Lorca needed little encouragement. During his travels with Berrueta he had been impressed by Madrid and was eager to try his luck in the capital. The city promised new friends, boundless opportunity, and a welcome change from the parochialism of life in provincial Andalusia. But his mother was reluctant to let him go. The three-hundred-mile trip from Granada to Madrid took more than twelve hours by train and even longer by road. Doña Vicenta worried that Lorca could not look after himself so far away from home. His father suspected otherwise. He told his son Paco that since Lorca was bound to do “whatever he feels like doing, which is precisely what he’s done since the day he was born,” the landowner had no option but to send him to Madrid. “He’s determined to be a writer. I don’t know if he’ll be any good at it, but since that’s the only thing he wants to do, I’ve got no choice but to help him.”
Equipped with a full wallet, several letters of introduction, and a set of new clothes—including a suit, an assortment of starched white shirts, and a pair of patent-leather shoes—Lorca set off for the capital in the spring of 1919. Once there he moved into a pension with his friend José Mora Guarnido and immediately claimed Madrid as his own. Nothing about the city perturbed him—not its size (ten times that of Granada), not its traffic, not its tall buildings or its new subway system. “I feel as if I come from here,” he announced shortly after arriving. “There’s nothing strange about it. Nothing shocks me, especially not all this hubbub. It gives one strength and courage.”
His mother sent letter after letter to Mora Guarnido, imploring the journalist to watch after her son. “Don’t let him spend nights without sleeping.” “Make him write to me every week.” “Send me a telegram if he gets sick.” If a week passed without hearing from her son, Doña Vicenta demanded to know what he was doing and why the family had received no news from him. Lorca did his best to appease her. But he was far more interested in pursuing his new life in Madrid than in writing letters to his mother. He quickly made the rounds of the city’s cafés, and through his Granada colleagues met key individuals at the university, in the newspaper world, and in the Atheneum—the site of one of Madrid’s finest private libraries, and the center of the city’s intellectual life. His friends heralded his arrival as if he were a national celebrity. Lorca did his best to prove them right.
His theatrical personality drove itself “like a wedge into [Madrid’s] artistic world,” Mora Guarnido recalled. For the first time, Lorca grasped the seductive power of his own charm. He impressed several of the city’s most illustrious artists. Playwright and director Gregorio Martínez Sierra took note of the talented youngster from Granada. The Catalan dramatist Eduardo Marquina talked of arranging a public reading of Lorca’s work. Juan Ramón Jiménez, the great poet from Andalusia, welcomed Lorca into his apartment, listened to his poems, and invited him to come back “so we can read and play the piano,” an exuberant Lorca reported afterward to his parents.
He was thrilled by his encounter with Jiménez. The celebrated poet had been seated in a “stupendous” armchair when Lorca arrived at his home bearing a sheaf of poems and a letter of introduction from Fernando de los Ríos. In Impressions and Landscapes, Lorca had described Jiménez as a “great poet of mist.” The image befitted the poet’s intensely lyrical verse as well as Jiménez himself, a moody, taciturn man plagued by spells of depression, who so craved silence that he once tried to insulate his office walls with sacking and esparto grass so that he could work undisturbed. Strikingly handsome, with brooding eyes, a black mustache and goatee, and a long, angular face that El Greco might have painted, he was introspective, self-absorbed, and petulant. His enemies called him Narcissus—a term Jiménez deemed accurate. On the afternoon of his meeting with Lorca he wore a black dressing gown trimmed in silver. Lorca sat on a nearby sofa and fixed an ecstatic gaze on the older man. Jiménez stared back at his dark-haired, “snub-nosed” guest.
The two talked about literature. To Lorca’s delight, “Juan Ramón”—as most called him—gossiped about Madrid’s literary elite and heaped scorn on the city’s “young little poets,” from whose ranks Lorca understood himself to be excluded. He was in awe of the older poet. Then thirty-seven, Jiménez was one of Spain’s two reigning poets in the first years of the twentieth century; the other was Machado. At nineteen, Jiménez had published his first poetry collections, a pair of flamboyantly modernista works. He later turned his back on these volumes and sought to hone his style, progressively shedding the effusive, sentimental language of his earlier work in favor of a more concise, hermetic idiom stripped of ornament, a poetry Jiménez christened “naked verse.” A perfectionist, he labored daily, arduously, to create his obra; he spoke of poetry as his “discipline and oasis,” his “caprice and crucible.” By 1916 he had published fifteen books; he would produce four more by 1923. He agonized over each one, seeking the most beautiful typeface and cover, the perfect paper. It grieved him to publish his work. “The moment I receive the first printed copy … I tear off the cover and begin all over again,” he confessed. “Letting go of a book is always, for me, a provisional solution, reached on a day of weakness.” Lorca would adopt the same attitude.
As a member of the Generation of ’98, Jiménez aspired to “remake” Spain by remaking the Spanish language, specifically, by reshaping its poetry—eliminating the rhetoric of imperial Spain, the hollow idioms of politics, and introducing a quieter, more intimate and memorable form of discourse. He believed, with Shelley, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and he devoted much of his life to the creation of a “political poetics,” an “ethical aesthetics”—an art that, while not explicitly political, nonetheless wields a subtle and profound effect on public sensibility.
In this, as in his conviction that poetry is a spiritual rather than a materialistic pursuit, and in his constant efforts to renew traditional forms of Spanish poetry—ballad, folk song, sonnet—Jiménez was to prove an exemplary teacher to Lorca. He taught through his poems, as well: works suffused with the lore and landscape of his native Andalusia, lines that chart Juan Ramón’s love of nature and music, and his intense, prodigious, morbid fascination with death.
That afternoon, Lorca read a handful of his own poems to Jiménez. The older poet expressed admiration for the works. He asked Lorca to leave a few poems behind so that he could show them to his wife, Zenobia. Afterward, Jiménez wrote to Fernando de los Ríos: “Your poet came, and he made an excellent impression on me. He seems to possess a very fine temperament and what I judge to be the essential virtue in art: enthusiasm. He read me some very beautiful compositions. A little long, perhaps, but concision will come on its own. I hope I don’t lose sight of him.”
A second letter from de los Ríos introduced Lorca to Alberto Jiménez Fraud, director of the Residencia de Estudiantes, a prestigious men’s residence hall where de los Ríos had suggested Lorca try to live the following autumn. Admission to the Residencia was selective, and dependent chiefly on recommendations from prominent citizens.
Jiménez Fraud took an instant liking to Lorca. During their interview, the director asked him what his father did for a living. “My father is just rich,” Lorca shrugged. Charmed, Jiménez Fraud asked the “dreamy-eyed” poet if he would agree to give a reading of his work at the Residencia, as a kind of informal audition for admission to the institution. Lorca said yes, and days later gave a triumphant recital before an enthusiastic crowd that included several of his Granada friends—one of whom remarked that in the previous six months Lorca had “improved enormously.”
Lorca’s confidence soared. He had expected to conquer Madrid, but not so quickly, and certainly not so easily. “This business about how difficult it is to do well here isn’t true with me,” he bragged to his family. “I’m having real success.” He ridiculed Madrid’s “little writers” and brashly characterized the level of the city’s artistic life as “rock bottom.” “If I don’t come back here next year,” he threatened, “I’ll throw myself off th
e towers of the Alhambra.”
Flushed with achievement, he returned to Granada in the late spring of 1919. On June 15, ten days after his twenty-first birthday, he attended a tribute to Fernando de los Ríos in the Alhambra’s Generalife gardens. As a result of his support for local workers earlier in the year, de los Ríos had recently won election to the Spanish Parliament.
During the evening, Lorca and another local writer gave a poetry reading. Among their listeners was Gregorio Martínez Sierra, a small, impeccably dressed man in his late thirties, with a domed brow and black eyes. Although Martínez Sierra had met Lorca a few weeks earlier in Madrid and been impressed by him, there was something about Lorca’s recital that evening in the Generalife’s lush gardens that prompted him to pay closer attention. A writer, editor, publisher, and stage director, Martínez Sierra was in Granada with his theater company, the Teatro Eslava, to present a series of plays, among them Ibsen’s revolutionary drama A Doll’s House. The director had founded the Eslava three years earlier with the express intent of combating the trite bourgeois theater then so popular in Spain, and he had shaped the company’s repertoire accordingly. Typically the Eslava offered both classical and contemporary works, with an emphasis on poetic drama, especially the work of the Belgian symbolist, Maurice Maeterlinck.
As he listened to Lorca read, Martínez Sierra detected hints of Maeterlinck, particularly in Lorca’s allegorical poems about the Granadan landscape. The director may have recognized something of himself, too, in the passionate young Granadan. Like Lorca, Martínez Sierra had published his first book in his teens, a lyrical tome filled with nostalgic descriptions of nature. As a child he had staged amateur theatricals. As a teenager, he had dropped out of college, bored with its formalities. Throughout his adolescence he believed he was “destined to die young and live sadly.” But he survived, fell in love, married at eighteen, and embarked on a promising theatrical career with his wife, María, who collaborated with him on his plays. Sometime after founding the Eslava, Martínez Sierra left his wife for the company’s leading actress, an attractive brunette named Catalina Bárcena, who was with the director that evening in Granada.
Bárcena shared her companion’s enthusiasm for Lorca’s poetry. After the recital, Martínez Sierra approached Lorca and asked if he might be willing to give the couple a private reading. Lorca consented and, in an ancient Arab tower overlooking the Generalife, regaled the director and his companion with more poems. Martínez Sierra was spellbound. “This poem is pure theater!” he exclaimed after hearing one particular work, a sentimental account of animal life in the vega. “What you must do now is expand it and turn it into true theater. I give you my word, I’ll premiere it at the Eslava.”
The offer was irresistible. Lorca had already tried his hand at a number of scripts, most of them static dramas about familiar topics, barely indistinguishable from his poems. Except for the amateur productions he had staged at home for family and friends, he had no practical theater experience. But he loved the stage and was determined to write plays. He accepted Martínez Sierra’s proposal on the spot, and within weeks began trying to draft a script. The process turned out to be more difficult than he had anticipated, however, and despite Martínez Sierra’s repeated encouragements by letter, Lorca failed to complete a play that summer. When he returned to Madrid in the late fall of 1919, he went back empty-handed.
The threat of another flu epidemic kept him in Granada until the end of November. Because Lorca reached Madrid late in the term, he was unable to move into the Residencia, as planned, and instead took a room in a boardinghouse surrounded by “unendurable” street noise and vagrants whose presence was so distracting, he said, that it prevented him from writing letters home. He assured his parents that once he moved into the Residencia, “with my silent little room and my beloved books,” he would write regularly.
His parents worried about him. His mother fretted about his well-being, and his father about his career prospects. The landowner demanded to know “the truth” about Lorca’s literary affairs. He distrusted his son’s incessant declarations of success. Even Lorca’s brother nagged him. When their parents sent Federico a pair of shirts by rail, Paco reminded him to “please pick them up and don’t do what you usually do with your things.” He then apologized for his outburst. “You’re no doubt resting up from all the sermons you get here about your indolent temperament.”
But Lorca needed reminding. In Madrid he answered to no one. He lived spontaneously, indulging in fun, heedless of his obligations to his parents—or, more critically, his promise to Martínez Sierra, who had now announced that he intended to produce Lorca’s play early in 1920. During the first weeks of December, Lorca worked halfheartedly on a script in a friend’s apartment. At Christmas he went cheerfully home to Granada, assuring Martínez Sierra that he would be back in Madrid by January 7. But without bothering to inform the director, he then prolonged his stay. Shortly afterward Martínez Sierra sent a tart letter demanding to know “a firm date by which time I will have the finished work in my hands so that rehearsals can start.”
Lorca ignored him. He had no appreciation of the everyday workings of the theater, and was insensitive to the artistic, financial, and scheduling pressures Martínez Sierra faced. At twenty-one, Lorca had never taken responsibility for himself or his affairs. Money meant nothing to him; in matters of art, he preferred to let inspiration, not deadlines, be his guide. Convinced of his own genius and virtue, he blithely elected to delay work on his script for Martínez Sierra until it suited him to resume drafting the play.
He could conceive of no reason why anyone should fault his behavior. Months earlier he had told his parents there was “so much literary deadwood” in Madrid that success was his for the asking. “For me, the field is richly primed.” With little effort, he had been asked to write a play by one of the country’s leading directors, and another distinguished man of the theater, Eduardo Marquina, had volunteered to contribute a prologue to a published edition of his poems. Although the edition ultimately failed to materialize, Lorca remained buoyant. “I’m in no hurry to ‘arrive,’ as they say. In literature it’s extraordinarily prudent to proceed with leaden feet,” he informed his family. “… I am convinced that the doors will open for anyone who creates good work.”
His long Christmas holiday in Granada ended in late January 1920, when Lorca returned to Madrid and took a room at the Residencia de Estudiantes. From the instant he arrived, he gloried in the place. Founded in 1910 by royal order, and based on the tenets set forth in the 1870s by Francisco Giner de los Ríos and his Free Teaching Institution, the Residencia was an informal residential college where cultured young men could live and learn at leisure. Director Alberto Jiménez Fraud called it a “spiritual home” for Spaniards, and it was that: a rarefied setting in which a generation of men was meant to forge the new and liberal Spain envisioned by the country’s leading intellectuals. Foreigners nicknamed it the “Oxford and Cambridge” of Madrid.
At the Residencia, Lorca enjoyed the same pampered existence he had always led at home. A full complement of housekeepers, cooks, and maids was on hand to clean his room, make his bed, wash his clothes, and prepare and serve his meals. There were no academic requirements and few rules. Residents were expected to wear proper dress in the dining hall, to arrive punctually for meals, and to sit in assigned seats, but were otherwise at liberty to come and go as they pleased, to study or not, to pursue whatever avenues they deemed useful to their scientific, artistic, and intellectual advancement.
Lorca moved into a spacious room, “bathed in sunlight from dawn to dusk,” with magnificent views of Madrid. He felt immediately at home. Days after settling in, he told his parents that his new life in Madrid was healthier than the old one in Granada, “because I have to get up early and eat breakfast.” Although his room was spartan, with scrubbed wooden floors, pine furniture, and a single radiator for heat, he thought it a “happy” place and, in a poem written a few months af
ter his arrival, observed that it had become
saturated with the aroma
of my new heart.
The chairs now smile at me.
And the mirror knows me. (At times
the mirror says I’m handsome.)
He flourished at the “Resi,” as occupants called the place. Built on a hilltop on the northernmost edge of Madrid, the peaceful campus was planted with flowering shrubs and hundreds of poplar trees, whose leaves rustled so loudly in the spring that Lorca compared the effect to the sound of “whales frying.” To his family he stressed the benefits of living in such relative seclusion. “You get absorbed in your studies and you forget completely about Madrid.” He neglected to mention that he did little studying himself while living there. His room possessed few of the academic tomes that filled his fellow residents’ quarters, and although he registered for a few university classes, he rarely attended them. Lorca “did practically nothing in Madrid,” a friend recalled. He was a hopeless student, “always on vacation.”
At the Residencia he took part in excursions to the Prado and other museums, and he attended in-house concerts and lectures. During his first years there, guest speakers included H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Paul Valéry, and Louis Aragon. A decade later Lorca claimed to have attended “nearly one thousand lectures” at the Residencia, all of which, he teased, left him gasping for “air and sunshine.” Among friends he parodied those speakers whose “literary accent” and “delicate pedantry” annoyed him. But despite his mockery, he learned from the Residencia’s speakers to regard teaching as a crucial component of what every artist must do.
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