Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  To Fernández Almagro, he described the dialogues as “more universal than the rest of my work … (which, in parentheses, I don’t find acceptable).” Lorca later pronounced both the dialogues and Perlimplin “very poor.” He drew little comfort from his work. “I’ve gone through a terrible, dark time of grave emotional depths which neither my lyric nor my innate happiness has been able to combat,” he told another friend. Professionally, he was drifting. He had completed two full-length plays since 1920—Mariana Pineda and The Billy Club Puppets—both of which remained unproduced. He had not published a poetry collection since 1921.

  At twenty-seven, he was under renewed pressure from both family and friends to prove himself. “My parents are angry with me,” he told Fernández Almagro. The critic was unsympathetic. “You don’t tell me why your parents are angry with you, but I can imagine why. And in your conscience you know we’re right when we reproach you for your ‘things’… Everyone who loves you laments your idleness.” He urged Lorca to “discipline and manage” himself.

  But Lorca yearned to escape. He felt that time was closing in, dissolving him “the way water dissolves lumps of sugar.” He longed to travel abroad, to go to Paris or “to Italy, which is my dream.” Instead, it was his enterprising brother who went to France in the fall of 1925 as the recipient of a government scholarship—Paco’s second visit to the country in two years. Lorca stayed home. Newly worried about his oldest son’s floundering career, Don Federico refused to let him leave Granada until he had shown he could support himself. Lorca toyed with the idea of a teaching career. He told Fernández Almagro he was thinking about taking “some qualifying exams, and if not … we’ll see! I don’t think I’ll lack for money as long as I’m strong.”

  Both friends and admirers nagged him. The Madrid critic, Enrique Díez-Canedo, remarked publicly in 1926 that Lorca had shown “unspeakable laziness” in refusing to publish anything since Book of Poems. Rafael Alberti told Lorca that, given his abilities, he should have published five or six books by now. “You’ve been too distracted.” Benjamín Palencia, the painter in whom Lorca had confided his feelings toward Dalí, also scolded him. “It’s not right that the best young poet in Spain should be unknown and unpublished.” The poet Gerardo Diego spoke of “the impossible and doubtful and problematic Federico García Lorca.” Even Lorca’s mother reprimanded him, arguing that “without realizing it you get tired of your work and drop it, because nothing pleases you, and that’s the source of your apathy and neglect.”

  Chastened, Lorca plotted his literary salvation. “I work in order to die living,” he told Fernández Almagro. “I don’t want to work to live dying. I’m renewing myself. Thank God, in whom each passing day I place my desire and my dreams.”

  10

  Incorrigible Poet

  1926-27

  In 1924 the Revista de Occidente had announced the appearance of a new movement, surrealism, “one of the latest inventions of the French literati.” In 1925 the journal published André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto,” a plea for the resolution of “dream and reality into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality.”

  The news intensified Lorca’s desire to visit France, to establish himself as a player in the avant-garde. “Foreign waters,” he told a friend in early 1926, would refresh his poetry as well as his heart. He begged his brother to send him “all the news” from France—“your impressions of Bordeaux, of the surrealist youth, etc.” From other friends in Paris, among them Luis Buñuel, he learned of further artistic and intellectual developments in the French capital.

  He resolved to demonstrate his mettle by publishing not one but three books of poetry: Suites, Poem of the Deep Song, and a new collection to be called Songs (“the best one!”), consisting of nearly ninety poems composed between 1921 and 1926. He had no publisher, and no one to help him prepare his manuscripts, but he felt capable nonetheless “of creating a great, original oeuvre, and have faith I can do so,” he told his brother. As soon as the books came out he intended to go to Madrid and then to France. “In four months time I could put French under my belt.”

  Because they possessed a “rare, surprising unity,” he planned to issue the three collections simultaneously in a cardboard slipcase. He labored over the arrangement of the poems, sifting through the disordered mass of papers he had accumulated since the publication of his last book in 1921. He sought to winnow each book until it contained only those poems that “belonged” to it. To his amazement, he found he enjoyed the process of collating and ordering his poetry. “I have seen completed things I couldn’t see before, and I’ve given balance to poems which were limping but which had heads of gold.” He also envisioned a fourth book, a Gypsy ballad collection, and in his apparent haste to complete that series, he wrote four new ballads in early 1926. These included “The Unfaithful Wife,” a work Lorca described as an “erotic ballad.”

  Convinced that he had entered a new phase of his career, he sent exultant reports to friends. “You can’t say I waste time!” he wrote breezily to Jorge Guillén. “I’m hacking away … a hardworking guy. I’m a gentleman who’s a knockout.” To Melchor Fernández Almagro he confided, “I want to be a Poet through and through, living and dying by poetry. I’m starting to see clearly. A high awareness of my future work is taking hold of me, and an almost dramatic sense of my responsibility constrains me … it seems to me I’m giving birth to new forms and an absolutely defined balance.”

  Dalí remained his most important audience. Lorca hoped the painter would design the covers for his new books. He worked on his long ode to the artist even as he rushed to complete his poetry collections. He finished the “Ode to Salvador Dalí” in March and published it the following month in Madrid’s progressive Revista de Occidente, edited by José Ortega y Gasset. The poem’s twenty-eight stanzas filled six pages of the journal. Critic Guillermo de Torre described it as a perfectly balanced “poetic transcription of cubism’s visual norms,” and later hailed the ode as “the most important work of 1926.”

  It was as much an exaltation of cubism as of Dalí, for to Lorca the two were vitally linked. Although Dalí was not a cubist per se, he embraced cubist ideals in his paintings. Lorca sought to effect the same dispassionate, analytical approach to reality in his ode. His poem presents an Apollonian Dalí, an artist who paints with a light “that the loving vines of Bacchus / and the chaotic force of curving water fear,” a man whose “astronomical and tender heart” is afraid of emotion, but who inspires the poet nevertheless: “I sing your restless longing for the statue, / your fear of the feelings that await you in the street.”

  The ode, like Dalí’s art of the period, is rigid, ordered, classical. Lorca wrote the poem in alexandrines, a meter he believed “must be clear, well constructed, and weighty,” as opposed to shorter forms, which, he said, “can be winged.” Dalí judged certain lines of the ode to be “almost ARITHMETIC.” He praised the poem’s objectivity. A prescriptive as well as a descriptive work, it stakes Lorca’s claim to a new aesthetic, effectively renouncing the romanticism of his past. In the ode, he outlines the evolution of Dalí’s art, from its inception in the “white ateliers” in Paris, where the first cubists practiced their craft, to its ripening in Cadaqués, whose angular shapes and horizon remind the poet of “wounded handkerchiefs.”

  Provocative metaphors combine with traditional metrics to give the ode a startling sense of newness. Guillermo de Torre called the poem a brilliant embodiment of the “two aesthetics of humanized and dehumanized art”—a reference to Ortega y Gasset’s 1925 essay “The Dehumanization of Art,” a work aimed at clarifying the chief traits and tenets of post-World War I movements such as cubism and expressionism. Having noted the tendency of these movements to avoid reality and eliminate living forms, Ortega coined the phrase “dehumanized art” to describe the phenomenon. His essay helped steer a generation of writers toward a “depersonalized” art devoid of the pathos of romanticism and naturalism and devoted to a spirit of play
. Lorca had toyed with the new aesthetic in his dialogues and erotic poems, but in the “Ode to Salvador Dalí” he went further, blending form and content to exalt the revolutionary art of his contemporaries. With its dispassionate tone and wild flights of metaphor—a tool Ortega defined as “the most radical instrument of dehumanization”—Lorca’s ode exemplified the new.

  And yet, as Torre observed, the poem is also a personal, “humanized” work of art designed to pay tribute to a beloved companion. Throughout the work Lorca extols Dalí’s “olive-colored voice” and “honest eyes,” his extraordinary talent and steadfast ideals. The poem ends with a prayerful appeal to his friend:

  May fingerprints of blood on gold

  streak the heart of eternal Catalunya.

  May stars like falconless fists shine on you,

  while your painting and your life break into flower.

  Don’t watch the water clock with its membraned wings

  or the hard scythe of the allegory.

  Always in the air, dress and undress your brush

  before the sea peopled with sailors and with ships.

  Despite his infatuation with the French avant-garde and his longing to go abroad, Lorca found things to admire in Spain. In February 1926, he made a two-day trip to the Alpujarras south of Granada. “I’ll never forget the village of Cáñar (the highest in Spain), full of singing laundresses and somber shepherds,” he told his brother. “Literarily speaking, there is nothing newer.” On February 13, during the inaugural ceremonies for Granada’s new Atheneum, Lorca delivered a lecture on a once-renowned sixteenth-century Cordoban poet, Luis de Góngora, whom he proclaimed “the father of the modern lyric.” Ostensibly a speech about a neglected baroque master, Lorca’s lecture, “The Poetic Image of Don Luis de Góngora,” was in effect a statement of Lorca’s own evolving poetics.

  He applauded the older poet’s “legacy of objectivity and his sense of metaphor.” In essence, Góngora had written “dehumanized” verse three hundred years before Ortega y Gasset defined the term. By stripping his poetic images of spontaneous emotion and what Lorca called “realities that die,” Góngora had created a lasting body of work. A genius at metaphor, he had memorably transformed the Straits of Magellan into an “elusive silver hinge,” and a grotto into a “melancholy yawn of the earth.” “A poem’s eternity,” Lorca said, “depends on the quality and coherency of its images.”

  Long overlooked, except for a brief vogue among the French symbolists and Hispanic modernistas, Góngora exemplified for Lorca and his generation their growing quest for a “pure” poetry, detached from reality and uncontaminated by ordinary usage. Góngora’s work—chiefly sonnets, ballads, and his four-part unfinished masterpiece, Solitudes—was objective, clear, and technically brilliant, just like Dalí’s paintings. Both men had striven to distance themselves from the Dionysian fires of creation and take refuge in an Apollonian world of order and control—a world Lorca also sought to inhabit, despite his impulsive, essentially emotional nature. “I do not believe any artist works in a state of fever,” he said in his lecture. “Even the mystics begin working only after the ineffable dove of the Holy Spirit has already abandoned their cells and is vanishing among the clouds. One returns from inspiration as from a foreign land. The poem is the narration of the voyage. Inspiration supplies the image but not its clothing.”

  In its front-page review of the talk, the Defensor de Granada called Lorca’s speech a “brilliant dissertation” and described Lorca as a “restless and delicate spirit, full of emotion.” An accompanying photograph showed his dark face staring moodily into the camera. Shocked by the uncharacteristic solemnity with which he had addressed his audience, Lorca, then twenty-seven, told Jorge Guillen, “My voice was another’s. It was a serene voice and full of years … as old as I am! It grieved me a little to see that I’m capable of giving a lecture without making fun of the audience. I’m becoming serious. I spend a lot of time in pure sadness. At times I surprise myself when I see that I’m intelligent. Old age!” Aware that Guillén had written a doctoral dissertation on Góngora, Lorca promised to forward a copy of his talk. “You tell me as a teacher what critical blunders it has,” he urged.

  By March, he had made some progress with his poetry books, but he still lacked a publisher and a secretary to help him prepare his manuscripts. In the meantime, he had resumed the dismal task of trying to find a producer for Mariana Pineda. Although confident that once he prevailed in the theater (“as I believe I will,” he told his parents) the doors to success would open wide, he had yet to find anyone willing to take on the play. Gregorio Martínez Sierra (“that bastard”) had withdrawn his initial offer to stage Mariana. Lorca had also sent a copy of the script to the Catalan playwright Eduardo Marquina, whom he had known since 1919, but Marquina had not responded. Lorca despaired. “Will anyone want to produce it?” he asked Melchor Fernández Almagro. “I’d like that for my family’s sake. There’s no doubt that I really have a feeling for the theater.”

  Confined to home until he published his books or otherwise persuaded his parents to let him leave, Lorca groped for ways to withstand the tedium of provincial life. At times he believed Granada had a “deadly” effect on his work. He harbored few illusions about the city. The older he became, the more he decried its faults. The granadino, he once said, is a man of “few friends,” because he withdraws from the world instead of embracing it. In words reminiscent of Unamuno, Lorca called for the “Europeanization” of his hometown. “We must love Granada, but we must think in European terms. Only in this way can we unearth our finest and most secret local treasures.”

  For years he and his Rinconcillo friends had flirted with the idea of publishing a small magazine in Granada, partly as a means of needling their complacent bourgeois neighbors. In recent years a number of Lorca’s poet friends had started literary magazines elsewhere in Spain. Eager to be part of the trend, Lorca announced in early 1926 that he, too, intended to found a magazine—“a joyful, lively, anti-local, anti-provincial review belonging to the whole world, as Granada does.” He planned to call the magazine gallo, or “cock,” because the cock “is a symbol of youth, whose song everywhere heralds the dawn.” If he couldn’t be part of the Paris vanguard, he would forge his own version of the avant-garde at home.

  He had no funding for the magazine and little idea how to proceed, other than to launch a letter-writing campaign to friends soliciting material for the first issue. Dalí agreed to design its cover. But even he had more business sense than Lorca. “I’ll make you all the covers you want for any magazine you like, but you’ve got to be more specific” he said. “Give me the facts: / size / black—color, etc. / the magazine’s degree of putrefaction.”

  In early April, Lorca’s parents paid his way to Madrid so that he could try to locate a producer for Mariana Pineda. Although he failed to find one, he secured a commitment from the Revista de Occidente to publish his Gypsy ballads in book form.

  From Madrid, he traveled north to Valladolid to visit Jorge Guillén and to give a public poetry reading, one of his first outside Granada. For Guillén, Lorca felt “total admiration, if not veneration.” Since their first meeting in Madrid two years earlier, he had come to know both Guillén and his lovely, French-born wife, Germaine, as well as their two small children, with whom Lorca struck up a playful correspondence. He admired Guillén’s calm and disciplined demeanor, his patent devotion to his family, and he was awed by the poet’s erudition. A gifted writer as well as scholar, Guillén had received his doctorate in literature from the University of Madrid and had taught at the Sorbonne before joining the faculty of the University of Valladolid. He looked like the professor he was: tall and lean, with round spectacles and a probing gaze. Guillén’s presence reminded Lorca of his own academic failings. He confessed sheepishly to the older writer, “I’m not intelligent, it’s true! But I’m a poet.” Guillén countered with unqualified praise for Lorca’s work. In response to a self-deprecating remark by Lorca
, he once sent a postcard addressed “to the Poet Federico García Lorca.” On the back he wrote, “Poet, yes, always. (Impossible, utterly impossible, the notion of ‘expoet.’)”

  Lorca relied on Guillén’s advice and encouragement, and looked for inspiration to the poet’s “clean and beautiful verse,” a highly refined, “pure poetry” that, while intelligent, was not “excessively cerebral.” In fact, Lorca argued, Guillén’s verse possessed “the gift of tears,” a phrase he borrowed from Saint Teresa. By contrast, he sometimes felt his own poetry lacked clarity and light. “I have too much chiaroscuro,” he complained to Guillén. “You’re generous with me. Ge-ne-rous.”

  At his poetry reading in Valladolid, Guillén introduced Lorca as a magnificent writer destined to enter the annals of history. “As the years go by,” he told the audience, “we’ll be able to say, ‘We saw in Federico García Lorca the great and glorious poet he later became. We were among the makers, not the grave diggers.’” Guillén enumerated Lorca’s gifts as a poet, playwright, artist, and musician, and praised Lorca’s oratorical skills. Lorca himself then took the stage. To local critic Francisco de Cossío he seemed “almost adolescent,” with his clumsy walk and engaging smile. But the moment he began reading, Cossío knew he was in the presence of a master. The critic praised Lorca’s poetry and predicted his eventual fame. Someday, he wrote, children will sing Lorca’s ballads, and young girls will “whisper his songs in secret.” The Defensor de Granada reprinted Cossío’s flattering review, together with excerpts from Guillén’s introduction, under the heading “A Granadan Poet in Castile.” By letter Lorca took pains to inform his parents that he had been “well taken care of” in Valladolid and had passed several agreeable days “gratis”