Lorca
Page 11
But it was useless. Despite assurances that he socialized only on Sundays, when he and his friends went to the park (“I’m turning blacker than a genuine Angolan”), Lorca in fact squandered hours with his companions. He had a new roommate at the Residencia that semester, an impish teenager named Pepín Bello, who cared as little, if not less, for school as Lorca did. Bello seldom passed an exam and in time abandoned his studies altogether, dismissing his chosen field of medicine as nothing but “dissection and putrefaction.” He preferred to carouse with friends and dabble in nonsense. Blond and boyishly lean, he was, according to a friend, “a mischievous genius … happy, electric, a maker-inventor of a thousand silly remarks and situations.”
He and Lorca became firm friends. Years later Bello recalled their days together at the Residencia as having been tinged with a “special aura.” “You’re my best friend, the one I love most,” he told Federico, whom he nicknamed “cherry,” a probable pun on “chéri.” Like others, he was dazzled by Lorca’s ingenuity. At night Lorca sometimes sat in their room and read plays by Lope de Vega to friends, or he gave impromptu sketches of contemporary authors. Occasionally Bello would come home to find his roommate so absorbed in writing or revising a poem that he failed to notice his presence, even when Pepín spoke to him. Lorca went through virtual “labor pains” in order to write, Bello remembered. No poem was complete until he had shaped it to perfection.
Lorca spent much of the spring correcting proofs and rewriting individual poems for his book. He also began work on a new series of poems, a set of “suites” whose short, elliptical style differed radically from the poems he was about to publish. Sharply aware of the distinction between the two sets of verse, he told his parents his new poems were the “the most perfect thing” he had ever produced. “I’m very happy. Happy with myself and happy with my … future work!”
On June 15, ten days after Lorca’s twenty-third birthday, Maroto published Book of Poems “by Federico G. Lorca.” His mother sent her congratulations, and reminded Lorca to distribute copies of the book to every newspaper, politician, and man of letters in Granada. “I know that you know more than we do about these things,” she conceded, “but, my son, when it comes to matters of importance, parents can’t help thinking of their children as little boys and girls.”
Stacks of Book of Poems piled up in Federico’s room at the Residencia. As Lorca watched, Bello inscribed copies of the volume for their friends. The teenager signed Lorca’s name as if it were his own. It was the sort of joke both men loved.
Maroto had produced Book of Poems with meticulous care, setting the volume’s sixty-eight poems in handsome typography and beginning each poem on a new page. Both the cover and the frontispiece featured a small modernista image of a nude woman bathing. Lorca dedicated the 298-page book to his brother, “Paquito,” then eighteen, whose help in preparing the collection had been crucial. Despite their temperamental differences and the constant comparisons between the two at home, Lorca adored his younger brother and had come to rely on his astute critical eye.
It was Paco who had persuaded him to include samples of his earliest verse in Book of Poems, so that readers could get an accurate picture of the poet’s artistic evolution. As a result, many poems in the collection were more than three years old by the time the book appeared, and illuminate the process of self-criticism and self-censorship Lorca had undergone in assembling the book. To underscore their age and aesthetic disparity, as though documenting an archive, he dated each work and in many instances noted the place of its composition. He was conscious of the collection’s “limitations” and “irregularities,” and in an apologetic prologue to the volume cautioned readers, “I offer, in this book, which is all youthful ardor, and torture, and measureless ambition, the exact image of my days of adolescence and youth.” Each poem in the volume reminded him of his passionate childhood, he said, “running about naked through the meadows of a vega against a mountainous background.”
Book of Poems is the largest, most wide-ranging collection of poetry Lorca was to publish in his lifetime. Culled from the vast outpourings of his adolescence, it is, together with Impressions and Landscapes and The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, a portrait of his youth. Like those works it announces Lorca’s talent and introduces the primary themes of his art: love, death, childhood, nature, God, the character of the poet and of poetry. Although in time Lorca would learn to transform the reflective, vaguely melancholy quality of these first works into acute drama, he never strayed far from their subject matter.
Nature is the chief source of inspiration in Book of Poems, and the vega its principal setting. From the volume’s first stanza to the last, Lorca delights in the region, lovingly cataloging its insects and sunsets, moonscapes and wheatfields, forcing readers to view the collection’s author in the context of his native Andalusia, and thereby stressing his ties with the region’s more celebrated turn-of-the-century poets: Jiménez, Manuel and Antonio Machado, Salvador Rueda, and Francisco Villaespesa, whose melodramatic reworkings of symbolist idioms and emotions struck a resonant chord in Lorca. He clearly saw himself as one in a distinguished line of Andalusian poets. Of the water that courses through the vega’s streams and irrigation canals, he writes:
It is the intimate sap
that ripens the fields,
the blood of poets
who loosed their souls
to wander all the ways
of Nature.
Formally, Book of Poems resembles a metrical exercise book, with lines ranging from the conventional alexandrines of high-art verse to the brief lyrics of the Spanish oral tradition. In the collection’s best poems, Lorca discards the Hispanic modernismo of his earliest writing and invokes the sparse language of popular verse. Lines shorten, metaphors replace similes, and Lorca reveals his startling gift for images, one sharpened by his contact in Madrid with the creationist and ultraist movements. A welcome note of irony and playfulness appears. Trees, he writes, are “arrows / fallen from blue.” The half-moon is a “fermata” that “marks a pause and splits / the midnight harmony.”
The poems in this “disordered” collection, as Lorca described it in his prologue, span the years 1917 to 1920 and show a writer straining to find himself. Lorca draws heavily on the authors he most admired in adolescence: Darío, Unamuno, Hesiod, Hugo, Goethe, Jiménez, and above all Antonio Machado, with whom Lorca shares a nostalgia for childhood, a love of traditional Spanish song, and a predilection for such images as the unknowable “road of life” and the terrible “waterwheel of time.” In the volume’s older, more discursive poems, he adopts a declamatory tone he later shunned. In newer works he is far briefer and more personal. The ill-defined melancholy that marks much of the collection gives way to an acute perception of what suffering and loss entail: “And the real soul awakens in death? / And the thoughts we think now are swallowed by night?”
In several of the book’s newer poems, Lorca borrows refrains and images from traditional children’s songs, works whose abbreviated lines and fragmentary plots he had known since boyhood. Although his use of children’s songs is often superficial—a parody of the real thing rather than a deeply imagined reworking of its elements—the effort nevertheless points to a new direction in his work, a new way of envisioning childhood. “Who showed you the road / of the poets?” a group of children asks the narrator in “Ballad of the Little Square.”
“The fountain and the stream / of the old song,” the poet replies.
Throughout Book of Poems, Lorca explores the familiar modernista dialectics of sin and innocence, carnal and celibate existence, flesh and spirit. He pits the pagan splendor of ancient Rome against the dull morality of Catholic Spain. Venus becomes “the world’s harmony” and God a capricious being in a “boring old blue heaven” who plays with human beings “like toy soldiers.” Satan is a friend: “we took an exam in Lust together.” The book’s young narrator mourns the loss of his arcadian youth and seeks comfort in nature and in language.
Baffled by sex, scorned by women, racked by desire, he weeps his passion “like a lost child” and wanders alone down the street,
grotesque, without solution,
with the sadness of Cyrano
and Quixote,
redeeming
infinite impossibles
with the rhythm of the clock.
My voice is stained with bloody light,
and I see irises dry up
at its touch;
in my song
I wear the finery
of a white-faced clown. Love,
sweet Love, hides
under a spider.
Lachrymose and derivative, sensual and elegiac, Book of Poems is plainly the work of a gifted but immature writer. Lorca complained that parts of the collection were “oppressive,” even “terrible.” But the book was a turning point in his career. It captured an era and, in doing so, freed Lorca to move forward. As he acknowledged in the prologue to the collection, “It would be cruel to scorn this work, which is so intertwined with my very life.”
Lorca left Madrid in late June 1921, within weeks of the book’s publication, and went home to Granada. He joined his parents on their farm in Asquerosa and settled into the familiar rhythms of country life. “I’m very happy to be surrounded by my family, who love me so much,” he told a friend. The sights and sounds of the vega soothed him. Here, he said, “I scoff at the same passions which in the tower of the city hound me like a herd of panthers.” Removed from the distractions of Madrid and the petty rivalries of the city’s literary life, he could relax and focus on his work: “I believe I belong among these melodic poplars and lyrical rivers.”
But there were annoyances. He arrived home to find that copies of Book of Poems had only begun to trickle into Granada’s bookstores, and no mention of the collection had yet been made in either the local or the national press. Lorca himself was largely to blame, for he had left Madrid without telling anyone where to send the book. Discouraged, his parents pressed him to do what he could to generate interest in the volume. Lorca turned to friends for help. From Madrid, José Mora Guarnido rallied with an effusive review for the Noticiero Granadino, which the paper published on the front page of its July 3 edition. In his review, Mora trumpeted the release of Book of Poems and hailed Lorca as “a singer of stars, a hunter of dreams.”
On July 30, a second friend, Adolfo Salazar, a plump, dark-haired madrileño in his early thirties, published a long review of Book of Poems in the influential Madrid daily El Sol. A distinguished critic as well as musician, Salazar usually wrote about music, not books. But he made an exception with Book of Poems, for although he had not known Lorca long, he was deeply impressed by his talent and infatuated by his personality. In the headline to his review, Salazar proclaimed the advent of “A New Poet: Federico G. Lorca.” The critic enumerated Lorca’s gifts: the vivid emotion and sonority of his verse, the poet’s sense of childlike astonishment at nature’s beauty, his affinity with the popular tradition. While noting the collection’s flaws—its “inevitable reminiscences,” “forced attempts,” and “high-sounding and artificial expressions”—Salazar advised readers that Book of Poems was a “book of transition,” and did not represent Lorca’s current work. It contained, instead, the “simple fruits of his dawning,” and as such constituted the poet’s “farewell” to the “naive hours” of his early career.
The review was a breakthrough, the first wholly positive notice Lorca had received in the Spanish national press. The day after its appearance, Salazar wrote to Lorca to clarify a few of the points he had made in the piece and to remind him of the great affection he bore him. “I’m longing to see you and to hear your frank and hearty laughter.” He warned Lorca to expect envy—“in your case the numbers will grow”—but cautioned him to remember that “those of us who love you” would remain constant. Lorca wrote back quickly. His gratitude to Salazar was immense, and he turned warmly to the critic. “The only way to repay you is to tell you that as you already know my affection is sincere, and my heart will always be loyally yours.” He thanked Salazar for his “high praise” and acknowledged his own misgivings about Book of Poems. “What’s bad stands out … but, dear Adolfo, when the poems were at the printers they seemed to me (or they seem to me) all equally bad … If only you knew! I don’t find myself in my book.”
In Salazar, Lorca saw that he had a crucial new ally as well as a generous friend and confidant to whom he could look for encouragement and advice—both of which he dearly needed. He asked Salazar’s help in securing additional publicity for his book, complained of his difficulties with his parents, and paid elaborate tribute to Salazar himself. “If you could only see how I remember you! There are friendships that slip through the fingers like clear water, others are like a rose that one absent-mindedly sticks in his lapel, but true friendships are … limpets placed silently over the heart.”
Salazar replied at once. He chided Lorca for not having done more to publicize his book and urged him not to lose faith in his family. Parents, he advised, “are oblivious to the intrigues and petty details of the literary world.” He invited Lorca to join him on a three-month tour of Europe the following year. “Tell your parents how splendid this trip would be for your spirit.” But Lorca declined. It is not clear whether he did so because his parents objected to the trip, or because he himself was uncomfortable with the idea.
Book of Poems received three additional reviews. One, by Guillermo de Torre, an ultraist poet, was unfavorable. Torre took issue with the collection’s mostly traditional, nineteenth-century tone. The book’s other reviewers, Spanish critic Cipriano Rivas Cherif and British musicologist and Hispanist John B. Trend, sang its praises. Rivas Cherif noted the volume’s “intensely romantic aroma” and “lyrical pantheism.” Trend, who had met Federico briefly in Granada in 1919, wrote that Book of Poems seemed “less reminiscent than many first books of verse.” Trend’s review appeared in the British journal the Nation and Athenaeum and gave Lorca his first foreign press coverage.
Aside from these reviews, Book of Poems “languished in silence, like all first books,” as Lorca was to reflect. Disappointed by the volume’s meager reception, his parents resumed their campaign to get him to finish his university degree. According to Lorca, they regarded him as “a failure because no one talks about me.” Nonetheless, he was beginning to acquire a name. In Granada, his friend and longtime champion Fernando de los Ríos now introduced him to visitors as “our local poet.”
Between June and September 1921, Lorca plunged into an intense period of work on the suites he had begun earlier in the year in Madrid. He planned to publish them in the fall. The series revealed his growing esteem for popular song as well as his new taste for shortened lines and heightened metaphor, as exemplified both by the recent work of Juan Ramón Jiménez and by Japanese haiku.
In Madrid, where Asian verse forms were the latest rage, Lorca had tried his hand at a series of haiku (he sent the set to his mother as a gift), and from the experiment had learned to say more with less. To his brother he explained, “Haiku must convey emotion in two or three lines.” Lorca’s new poems, terse and keenly personal, did precisely that. Through his suites he sought to effect the condition of music, or, as he told Salazar, to “render in words the sublime sensations of a reflection, removing from the tremor whatever it has of baroque undulations.”
An avid fan of haiku as well as a versatile musician and composer, Salazar was ideally suited to appreciate what Lorca was trying to do. In his correspondence with the critic, Lorca tried out phrases and ideas that subsequently found their way into poems. Describing the vega to Salazar he wrote: “Especially at nightfall one lives in complete fantasy, in a half-forgotten dream … there are times when everything evaporates and we’re left in a desert of pearl gray, of rose and dead silver.” Days later, in the suite “Shadow,” he distilled the scene:
The night sky
is a desert,
a desert of lamps
During the summer of 1921, Lorca composed some seventy-five short poems, works he then grouped thematically into suites with titles reminiscent of both art and music: “Palimpsests,” “Six Songs at Nightfall,” “Vignettes of the Wind,” “Seaside Prints.” Themes from earlier poems—lost childhood, impossible love, time, death—surface in fresh and provocative ways. “When we die,” Lorca writes in “Memento,”
we’ll take with us
a series of shots
of the sky.
(Skies around daybreak
and skies in the night.)
Though they’ve told me
that dead
we don’t have any memories
past a sky in midsummer,
a black sky
shaken up