Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Shortly after returning from Castile in the late summer of 1917, Lorca had announced to his family that he intended to bring out a book, and had asked his father to defray the costs of publication. His Rinconcillo friends endorsed the project, and immediately began offering advice. They urged Lorca to rid his writing of Professor Berrueta’s overblown romantic style, and Lorca complied, reworking various passages of his book to include negative remarks about art works that in Berrueta’s company he had once admired.

  His father meanwhile debated the merits of publication. He cornered Lorca’s friend José Mora Guarnido on the street one night and demanded to know what the journalist thought of his son’s writing. “As I’m sure you’ll understand, I don’t mind wasting one or two thousand pesetas to give him the pleasure of publishing a book. It would cost me more if he asked for an automobile or something worse,” the landowner said, chewing on a cigar. “But I don’t want every idiot in Granada laughing at him because of the book.” He worried in particular that his cronies in the town casino would mock his son’s “little poems.” Mora assured him that Lorca’s book was worthy of publication.

  Still skeptical, Don Federico consulted others: Professor Berrueta, Fernando de los Ríos, the editor of the local newspaper, Lorca’s grade school teacher. All agreed that Lorca had talent and deserved a chance. In the end, his father yielded. Arrangements were made with a local press to print the book, and Lorca began assembling a manuscript. The work he had originally envisioned, however, an assortment of essays culled from the material he’d written while traveling with Berrueta, was too sparse. To pad the book he dashed off several additional impressions of Granada as well as a series of lyrical “Themes,” some of which he extracted from his prose meditations. By the time he delivered his first chapters to the printer in late 1917 or early 1918, Lorca was still rushing to complete his manuscript.

  He gave a public reading from his forthcoming book at the Granada Arts Center on March 17, 1918. Two weeks later he received his first bound copy of Impressions and Landscapes, as he had chosen to title the book. The next day he began signing copies for family and friends. He approached the task with gravity. “To my great friend Antonio, delicate and sentimental, who dreams with his flesh overflowing in another, distant flesh,” read one of his more opulent inscriptions.

  Impressions and Landscapes received two local reviews. Aureliano del Castillo, of the Defensor de Granada, hailed the book’s skill and sincerity, despite its syntactical errors and what del Castillo called its “unnecessary trivialities.” Luis de Luna, of the literary journal El Exito, termed the work a “portrait of the artist, with his desires, his anathemas, his aspirations, and his dreams of Art and Poetry.” Luna, who knew Lorca personally, described him as a man so deeply preoccupied with life’s graver issues that he often neglected to “comb his hair and knot his tie.”

  Like its author, Impressions and Landscapes was rambling and unkempt. Grammatical, syntactical, and punctuation errors littered the text. The narrative itself consists of a loosely structured sequence of travel essays followed by a series of random prose meditations. The book’s cover, an art nouveau illustration designed by Ismael Gomez de la Serna, one of Lorca’s Rinconcillo friends, shows a framed painting of a landscape beside a floor lamp and a spider’s web. The image suggests the work’s prevailing motif: the Spanish landscape, illuminated by the author’s soul and ravaged by time. But the book’s underlying subject is art. Where does it exist? How is it made? What comprises it? Building on ideas he had set forth the previous summer in “Rules in Music,” Lorca argues in Impressions and Landscapes for an art derived from the soul and founded on personal sentiment. “Poetry exists in all things, in the ugly, in the beautiful, in the repugnant,” he advises in the book’s prologue. “The difficult thing is knowing how to discover it, how to awaken the deep wells of the soul.”

  From both Domínguez Berrueta and the romantics, Lorca had learned to interpret existence by applying his own feelings and senses to things. Throughout Impressions and Landscapes he filters the Spanish countryside through his consciousness, so that, as Luis de Luna observed, the work is less a portrait of a place than of the artist as a young man. Lorca understood this and warned readers that the book’s scenes are more accurately “passionate internal states” than objective renderings of external reality.

  Acutely aware of the book’s flaws and of its overall insignificance to Spanish literature, Lorca spoke of the work’s “vagueness” and “melancholy,” qualities that owe as much to the book’s sources as to his own sensibility. Most of Impressions and Landscapes is derivative, an amalgam of romanticism, symbolism, and Hispanic modernismo, tempered by a keenly felt social consciousness whose most immediate inspiration is the Generation of ’98. In his haphazard attempts to paint an emotional and geographical portrait of Spain, Lorca was trying on styles, seeking a voice. His descriptions of Castile borrow thematically and stylistically from Machado and Unamuno. A section on “Gardens” draws heavily on Darío and Jiménez. The book is a miscellany of voices and styles. Passages of intense introspection follow mannered accounts of regional customs and scenes. Pedantic critiques of monuments alternate with lyrical, often synesthetic impressions of sunsets, landscapes, and mood. Musical terminology and references to Lorca’s favorite composers fill the text.

  His first book reveals far less about the author’s public travels through Spain than about his private obsessions: the destructive powers of time and death, the constraints of faith, the lure of sex. Recounting his visits to Castilian monasteries, Lorca imagines the frustrations of monks and nuns who have renounced the flesh, and he questions their sexual identity. He recoils at the sight of a pair of crudely masculine monks with coarse hands who press their lips to the Holy Sacrament, but at the same time he derides a male passenger in a carriage who sighs with “monklike effeminacy.” He celebrates the carnal. In a markedly bacchanalian episode whose imagery is rooted in both popular tradition and classical mythology, Lorca describes a group of village women bathing in a river while young men watch from some nearby underbrush. “Nature hopes for a gigantic copulation,” he writes. “The young men roll about among the flowers and the elder as they see a girl emerge from the water, naked, her breasts erect.”

  Reviewing Impressions and Landscapes, Aureliano del Castillo noted that the book’s exuberant young author was only nineteen years old. The critic predicted that before two years had passed, the stylistic excesses and “tiny blemishes” that mar the volume “will have disappeared from his work. The cleansing of style, like the cleansing of color, is the final phase in the artist’s formation.” Despite its faults, Lorca’s first book announced his presence as a writer and introduced the issues that would dominate his subsequent work. To Lorca, the volume served as a tangible symbol of his conversion from musician to writer. He assumes a number of guises in the book: poet, teacher, social critic, playwright, and, above all, romantic. The narrator of Impressions and Landscapes is a melodramatic figure, a modern-day Quixote in search of the impossible. Oppressed by society and by the needs of his flesh, enamored of nature and beauty, haunted by the past, he seeks a spiritual and aesthetic absolute that persists in eluding him.

  His primary mode is elegiac. He longs in vain for what is absent or lost, for what cannot be named. He is painfully aware that he will never fulfill his quest “for something spiritual or beautiful to ease our soul from its principal sorrow. We go bounding off in search of an impossible happiness … But we almost never find it.” The object of human desire changes constantly. Its essence, Lorca writes, “is immutable.”

  Shortly after the book’s publication, Lorca took a signed copy of Impressions and Landscapes to Martin Domínguez Berrueta. The small, gray-haired man opened the volume and glanced inside. Suddenly he hurled the book at Lorca and ordered the teenager to leave his house. Two weeks later, Berrueta returned the volume to Lorca with a curt note explaining that although it grieved him to act with such “violence,” he did no
t wish to keep the book in his possession.

  He had expected that Lorca would dedicate Impressions and Landscapes to him. But Lorca had instead consecrated the book to “the venerable memory” of another man, his former piano teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa. Berrueta was furious. His own name appeared just once in the book, in a brief afterword where Lorca paid tribute to his “dear teacher D. Martín D. Berrueta” and the “dear companions” who had accompanied him on his travels. Otherwise there was no mention of the professor whose expeditions had in large part enabled Lorca to write Impressions and Landscapes.

  His traveling companions were shocked. They rebuked Lorca for his selfishness, reminding him that it wasn’t Berrueta who had accompanied Lorca on his journeys, but Lorca who had accompanied Berrueta. Worse, he had neglected to ask the professor to contribute a prologue to the book, as originally planned, and in a number of passages had thoughtlessly challenged Berrueta’s cherished ideas about art. Not long after the book’s publication, Lorca further snubbed the professor by evidently contributing to some derisive remarks about him in a local newspaper. These “domestic flatteries,” as Berrueta called them, were the final straw that drove him to sever all ties with Lorca.

  Berrueta and his wife mourned the rupture, as did Lorca’s parents. But Lorca was impenitent. Berrueta was merely a critic of art, not an artist, and in his quest for greatness Lorca sought to identify himself with the latter. He wanted to follow in the footsteps not of a teacher but of a genuine creator—an artist like his former piano teacher, Segura Mesa, a disciple of Verdi, a dreamer who despite the failure of his work had never compromised or abandoned his dreams. That his choice might devastate Berrueta did not concern Lorca. He was blinded by ambition.

  The two men never reconciled. Two years later, at age fifty-one, Martín Domínguez Berrueta died. As an adult Lorca took pains to express in public the debt he owed Berrueta. In private, he confided to the professor’s son that he regretted the events of 1918. “I’ll never forgive myself,” he said.

  Besides its principal dedication to Antonio Segura Mesa, five chapters in Impressions and Landscapes bore dedications to Lorca’s friends. Among them were María Luisa Egea González, the young blonde from Granada with whom he remained infatuated, and his devoted admirer in Baeza, Lorenzo Martínez Fuset, who promptly launched a one-man campaign to promote the book. In Baeza, Martínez Fuset spoke about Lorca’s book to Antonio Machado, who expressed a desire to see the work. After scrutinizing the text, Machado advised Lorca, through Martínez Fuset, to “abandon his law studies, since being an artist entails separation, the breaking of Harmony, and divorce from the systematic.” The older poet also urged Lorca to prove himself outside his hometown. “One’s first successes ought to be measured in places where it’s harder to triumph.”

  Lorca was quick to heed at least some of Machado’s advice. He took no university exams in the spring of 1918, and the following autumn dropped out of school completely. His breach with Berrueta had intensified his dislike of the university, and he saw no need to continue. Besides, he had other, more useful teachers. In addition to Machado, Miguel de Unamuno perused Impressions and Landscapes and, according to Lorca, published an insightful review of the book. “No one has taught me as much about my art as Unamuno did on that occasion,” Lorca said later of the review, whose existence has never been proven.

  At the end of Impressions and Landscapes, Lorca listed his forthcoming works. They included a volume of poems, which he falsely claimed was “at press,” as well as a series of books “in preparation.” Some of these existed; some did not. Lorca drew no distinction between the two: to conceive of a work was to create it. “Whenever he found himself with a friend,” a colleague remembered, “he’d discover a new project, he’d invent his next tragedy.”

  5

  Debut

  1918-20

  On June 5, 1918, Lorca turned twenty. He could no longer fend off adulthood or, with it, the possibility of death. Three days after his birthday he learned that one of his childhood friends, a young man his age, had died. That evening Lorca wrote a poem in his friend’s memory. All summer long he thought about death, a process fueled in part by contemporary events. By fall, the worst flu epidemic in history had struck Europe, afflicting 150,000 people in Spain alone. Within a year the so-called Spanish flu had claimed twenty million victims worldwide. In France, the disease assailed a country already ravaged by four years of trench warfare—a murderous deadlock that killed, maimed, or wounded nearly half of those who took part in it. “One eats, one drinks beside the dead, one steps in the midst of the dying, one laughs and one sings in the company of corpses,” wrote French surgeon Georges Duhamel in the midst of the Battle of Verdun, which lasted ten months and claimed more than 700,000 lives.

  The Granada press issued daily reports of the fighting, as it had since the outbreak of war in 1914. By September 1918, Allied soldiers, having stemmed repeated German attempts to advance, were on the verge of rupturing the once-impregnable Hindenburg Line. In Berlin, starving citizens sifted through heaps of garbage in search of potato rinds.

  In early September Lorca wrote a poem, “Dawn of the Twentieth Century,” in which he described war as the “failure of the soul / and the failure of God.” He believed the world had lost both its innocence and its faith, had entered a brutal new era: “Dawn! Ancient hour of Apollo. / Today it is the hour of Horror.” On November 11, jubilant crowds poured into the streets of Granada to celebrate the signing of the Armistice. Two days later Lorca attended a tea in honor of the Allies. Among his fellow guests was Fernando de los Ríos, who earlier in the week had given a speech extolling the League of Nations and calling for an end to the Spanish monarchy as well as a suspension of the military’s power in Spain.

  Lorca shared de los Ríos’s contempt for the monarchy and his distrust of the military. The matter was more than theoretical. At twenty, Lorca was eligible for service in the Spanish army and, like thousands of his compatriots, at risk of being sent to Morocco to defend the Spanish protectorate against tribal attacks. In the aftermath of the country’s humiliating defeat in 1898, and the loss of its remaining colonies, Spain’s young king, Alfonso XIII, had sought to salvage the army’s honor by dispatching thousands of troops to Spanish Morocco, the nation’s last remaining field of military action, where they took part in an endless and deadly series of clean-up operations in the Atlas Mountains. Because military duty in Spain was at the time a class affair, Lorca’s parents were able to purchase his freedom from service by arranging for a local doctor to pronounce him “totally unfit” for the army. The physician noted that besides problems in his legs, chest, and “light symptoms of spinal sclerosis,” “Youth Number 63” (who measured thirty-four inches around the chest and stood five-foot-seven) possessed legs of somewhat uneven length—hence his slight limp. The report spared Lorca from combat.

  But it did not shield him from violence. In early 1919, two months after the Armistice, labor strikes and political demonstrations erupted across Spain. In streets and squares, workers echoed de los Ríos’s cry for an end to the monarchy and a limit to military power. Weary of the irresponsible Alfonso XIII, who cared more for martial pomp than for running the country, Spaniards clamored for greater democratization and an end to caciquismo, the degenerate political system that kept vast segments of the rural population mired in poverty. The phrase “Viva Lenin” turned up on whitewashed walls throughout Andalusia.

  Lorca and his friends in the Rinconcillo joined the campaign for workers’ rights. They denounced caciquismo, and in early February commenced a drive to commemorate its victims by installing a plaque on City Hall. During the first two weeks of that month, workers and bosses clashed openly in Granada. Houses burned and shots were fired. Fernando de los Ríos began receiving anonymous threats and nighttime visits from the Civil Guard.

  On February 11, members of the Guard opened fire on a group of university students who were demonstrating in Granada not far from Lorca’s h
ome. A medical student was killed in the crossfire. By the end of the day two more citizens were dead and seven wounded. Martial law was declared. Shops and businesses closed, the trams shut down, and Granadans hung black bunting from their balconies in a show of solidarity with the victims. Fearing reprisals, authorities ordered the Civil Guard to stay out of the city until the situation cooled.

  Throughout the two-week period of civil unrest Lorca cowered inside his parents’ apartment. Although willing to voice his support for workers’ rights, he was fundamentally apolitical and, more to the point, he was terrified of violence. For two weeks he refused to venture onto the balcony of his parents’ home for so much as a glimpse of the streets below. He relied for news on his Rinconcillo friend Manolo Angeles Ortiz, who shuttled back and forth between his house and the Lorca apartment with reports of new developments. Each day, Angeles Ortiz stood on the sidewalk beneath Lorca’s window and shouted information up to Federico, who was so frightened he remained hidden from even his close friend.

  Lorca sought refuge in a different Granada, one far removed from the contentious city that engulfed him with its troubles in 1919. Four months after the labor disturbances he published a poem, “Granada: Humble Elegy,” in a local journal. The work, though derivative in manner and tone, underscored his absorption in the city’s past, and in doing so hinted at his dissatisfaction with its present. In the poem, Lorca mourned Granada’s ancient grandeur. Time, he suggested, had robbed the city of its glory. Time had rendered Granada a ghost of its former self, had transformed it into a “giant skeleton … before whom the Spanish poet keeps vigil and weeps.”

  Having earned a name in his hometown—or so he thought—Lorca understood that it was now time to prove himself elsewhere, as Machado had admonished. By the spring of 1919, several of his Rinconcillo friends had moved to Madrid, among them José Mora Guarnido, who urged Lorca to join him. “Tell your father I said he’d be doing you a bigger favor by sending you here than he would by taking you around the world.”