Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  While neither man was ready to associate himself formally with surrealism, both Lorca and Dalí had begun to experiment with such surrealist techniques as automatic writing and drawing, and dream images. Of the two men, Dalí, as usual, was the most radical. Privately he regarded Lorca’s “Saint Lucy and Saint Lazarus” as a “wonderful” piece of work, but the “quintessence of putrefaction.” In letters to Lorca he mocked writers whom Lorca had once revered, and he urged the poet to intensify his quest for the new. “Act of FAITH,” he declared. “Lorca, the first truly future poet when he is completely purified and emerges like a motionless, beautiful oil.”

  Heeding Dalí’s call for the creation of stark, inexplicable metaphors, Lorca turned from words to images and, while at work on his prose poems, began using drawing pencils for inspiration. When the subject of a poem became too long or “poetically stale,” he resolved it by sketching. The act of drawing made him feel “clean, comforted, happy, childlike,” he told the art critic Sebastian Gasch, whom he had befriended in Barcelona that spring, and who was quickly becoming one of his most trusted correspondents and greatest fans. While drawing, Lorca said, “I live moments of an intensity and purity that poetry does not give me.” Emboldened by Gasch’s lavish praise of his sketches (the critic compared Lorca’s work favorably with Picasso’s and predicted that his “unforgettable drawings” would enjoy a success similar to that of Miró’s and Dalí’s), Lorca began to talk seriously of publishing his drawings in book form.

  His best sketches, he knew, yielded exquisite metaphors. A spare interpretation of Saint Sebastian, for instance, showed only a series of arrows pointing to a series of ink blots, a single eye, and—in what Lorca may have intended as a reference to Sebastian’s “unwounded ass”—a single dot surrounded by a small circle. In this and other conceptual drawings, Lorca endeavored “to choose the essential traits of emotion and form, or of super-reality and super-form, to turn them into a symbol that, like a magic key, will lead us to better understand the reality they possess in the world,” he explained to Gasch.

  And yet he shunned pure abstraction and refused to align himself wholly with surrealism. He insisted that his drawings were grounded in reality, and therefore human. To Gasch’s worried observation that he risked slipping into a dangerous state of “perpetual dream” with his visionary sketches, Lorca replied cheerfully that humor and humanity would save him from “the great dark mirrors that poetry and madness wield at the bottom of their chasms.” Unlike Dalí, he would not abandon reason, would not sever his bond with the human community. “I am and I feel myself to be treading cautiously in art,” he told Gasch. Life itself was another matter. “I fear dreaming and the abyss in the reality of my life, in love, in the daily contact with others. That, yes, is terrible and fantastic.”

  Publicly he disavowed any link to revolutionary art movements. When Xirgu’s production of Mariana Pineda opened that fall in Madrid, Lorca told a reporter from the Heraldo de Madrid that he was neither an ultraist “nor a member of the avant-garde.” His poetic roots lay with Góngora, he said; his theatrical wellspring was Lope de Vega.

  By the standards of his recent work, Mariana Pineda was hopelessly outdated, but Lorca defended the play on the occasion of its Madrid debut. Asked to explain the drama’s many clichés, he answered that he had purposely included these so as to give the work its “romantic, but ironically romantic, character.” On opening night, October 12, 1927, Lorca stood confidently backstage and listened to the audience applaud his creation. At the end of each act he strode onstage—“with a vengeance,” said one observer—to accept their praise. Outside the theater, Lorca’s former grade school teacher, Antonio Rodríguez Espinosa, waited in the dark for news of the play’s reception as he had done seven years earlier at the premiere of The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. Now, as then, he was too nervous to venture inside the theater. Told at last that Mariana had triumphed, Rodríguez Espinosa sighed happily and said, “It had to come.”

  Once more, triumphant telegrams made their way to Granada. This time Lorca’s family packed their bags and set off for Madrid to see the play for themselves. The poet Pedro Salinas met them during their stay in the capital and pronounced them “a most enjoyable family, in whom one finds various scintillating clues to our friend’s personality—almost, almost a study of literary sources.”

  Reviewers, among them several of Lorca’s personal friends, were generous. But dissonant voices and familiar reproofs surfaced. The critic Enrique de Mesa accused Lorca of having loaded his play with every “trick from the old theater … the funereal pealing of bells, the flowers that adorn little Mariana as she goes to her death, the long and tedious farewell.” Francisco Ayala denounced the work’s “intentional ingenuousness. Artificial childishness.” During its brief Madrid run, Mariana sparked a lively polemic among the city’s intellectuals, who debated the play’s artistic merits and political bent. As the discussion grew more heated, Pedro Salinas noted that the majority of comments were “adverse.” At a banquet in Lorca’s honor, guests quibbled about the play until the famed humorist Ramón Gómez de la Serna finally rose, adjusted his monocle, and offered an ironic defense of the work. “It breathes with great freedom, great freedom, great freedom!” he said, and smiled.

  Commercially the show was a failure. It ran for only twenty-six performances in Madrid—well short of the hundred that typically signaled a success. On tour in the provinces later that season, it fared even more poorly. Audiences stayed away, and several performances had to be canceled. At a performance in Oviedo, Lorca’s self-consciously ornate language led one spectator to surmise, “It must be something written by one of those modern poets.” Although he reported to his parents that the play was enjoying a “great success” on tour, Lorca was painfully aware of the truth. To Pepín Bello he described the work as “an embarrassment.” To a journalist in Madrid he confessed that if he were to rewrite the play, “I’d do it another way, in one of the thousand ways possible.” Perhaps most disappointing, Mariana earned little money. Dalí, among others, was dismayed. The painter had hoped to use the profits from Lorca’s verse play to underwrite a new project—an “ANTIARTISTIC Magazine.”

  Despite his disenchantment with Mariana, Lorca welcomed the publicity the play generated. Later in the season he published the drama in book form. Theatrical gossip columns speculated about upcoming Lorca productions. The poet Antonio Machado and his brother, Manuel, declared in an interview that Lorca was one of the brightest lights in the contemporary Spanish theater. “Did you see what the Machado brothers said about me?” Lorca asked his parents.

  Work by and about him now appeared regularly in the country’s prominent literary journals, and there was also talk of him abroad, in both France and Germany. In a front-page article entitled “A Generation and Its Poet,” critic Ricardo Baeza of El Sol hailed Lorca as “the foremost Spanish lyric poet of our day.” Baeza’s article embarrassed Lorca even as it pleased him. It “must have produced a great rumpus among certain persons,” he told Sebastian Gasch. “I’m truly sorry because I had nothing whatsoever to do with this.”

  Many of his friends and peers cheered his new celebrity. The poet Gerardo Diego praised him for having finally forsaken his “medieval and random means of self-promotion, and his indolent aversion to proofs and postage stamps.” Although he still professed to regard his writing as merely “a game, an amusing diversion,” Lorca coveted the attention it brought him. He would sometimes grip one of his friends by the shoulder and exclaim, “Ah, how talented I am! Tell me I’m talented!” “You’re so talented,” the friend would reply, and Lorca would laugh and say, “Yes sir, I am!”

  Luis Buñuel, who saw Lorca during his periodic visits to Madrid, found his vanity insufferable. Others thought it charming. Lorca “let himself be adored,” an acquaintance remembered. He brazenly courted admirers, promising to dedicate poems to them and then forgetting his promise, or dedicating the same poem to a succession of friends. At tertulias h
e demanded to be the center of attention. If another speaker threatened to upstage him, he often left—only to return moments later with some crucial piece of news that restored him to the spotlight. He loved to ape others’ quirks—a friend’s blinking eyes or eccentric appearance—but when anyone dared to imitate him, he resented it. If he found himself with someone whose personality seemed capable of outshining his own, he simply walked away.

  He grew especially impatient with fellow Andalusian Rafael Alberti, whose career as a poet had taken flight since their first meeting in 1924 (Alberti won the 1925 National Prize for Literature for his verse collection Marinero en tierra), and whose passionate recitations of verse rivaled Lorca’s. Because both came from the south, comparisons between the two were inevitable, and they began to vie for the role of successor to Juan Ramón Jiménez as the region’s reigning poet. Pedro Salinas dubbed them “the little Andalusian boys.” Critics spoke of Lorca’s influence on Alberti’s neopopulist verse, and friends charted their respective development. Pepín Bello complained that Alberti had learned to “copy” images and expressions directly from Lorca’s poems. Salinas confided to Jorge Guillén in the fall of 1927 that he thought Alberti’s poetry much improved. “He’s undoubtedly making more progress than Federico.” In time, Lorca became so annoyed by the situation that when someone praised Alberti’s work in his presence, he feigned a sore throat and left. Aware that Lorca had on occasion spoken ill of him, Alberti implored him to forget their differences. “You don’t know how much I’m capable of loving you (this is not a declaration of love). You scarcely know me, cousin.” But Alberti, too, engaged in what he later referred to as “minimal battles,” and their friendship suffered as a result.

  With his elders, Lorca was more forgiving. One evening at a tertulia with the irascible Galician playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán, then in his sixties, Lorca took offense at something Valle-Inclán said or did and made a cutting remark to the older man. Stunned, Valle-Inclán left the gathering early. Lorca instructed his friends to “go with him. Don’t leave him alone. I’ve been cruel.” He was childishly content to let others repair his wrong. At another gathering, he deliberately conspired to prevent the humorist Ramón Gómez de la Serna from monopolizing the conversation. But afterward Lorca felt remorseful, and as he left the restaurant he struck up a friendly conversation with Gómez de la Serna. That “was the really charming thing about Federico,” recalled his friend Santiago Ontañón, who witnessed the episode.

  Friends like Ontañón and Jorge Guillén were willing to overlook the less flattering aspects of Lorca’s character—his petulance and immaturity, his incessant and puerile need for adulation. They focused instead on his generosity and basic lack of pretension. Guillén noted that even after Lorca became famous, he remained “Federico”—never “Señor García Lorca,” not even to strangers. Among close friends he was easygoing, spontaneous, and ordinary, and yet to Guillén he was plainly the best of their generation. Lorca agreed with this assessment, although he considered Guillén his equal. “We’re the captains of the new Spanish poetry,” he told the soft-spoken older poet. “Shake on it! You and I have character, personality, something inimitable that comes from within, a unique voice by the grace of God.”

  In his long treatise “A Generation and Its Poet,” Ricardo Baeza had marveled at the magnanimity with which Lorca and his peers spoke of one another. He noted, too, that as poets the group shared certain traits: a veneration for the image, a thirst for purified verse, and a simultaneous regard for tradition and the avant-garde.

  In particular, the new generation rallied around the figure of Luis de Góngora, the sixteenth-century Spanish poet about whom Lorca had lectured in early 1926, and whose dispassionate, densely metaphorical verse embodied the aesthetic principles underpinning his and his colleagues’ work. Throughout 1927, the tricentennial of Góngora’s death, Lorca and his fellow poets rendered elaborate homage to the baroque master. Several literary magazines published special issues devoted to Góngora, and a number of writers delivered lectures on the poet and his work. Both Lorca and Rafael Alberti tried to compose commemorative “solitudes” in honor of Góngora’s greatest, most ornate verse collection, Solitudes, but only Alberti succeeded. Lorca claimed to have felt irreverent even attempting the feat.

  He and his friends persuaded other luminaries to participate in the yearlong tribute to Góngora. Antonio Machado, Manuel de Falla, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and even Luis Buñuel (who later dismissed Góngora as “the filthiest beast ever born”) all contributed to the anniversary celebrations. But Ramón del Valle-Inclán and a cantankerous Juan Ramón Jiménez—who increasingly sought to distance himself from Lorca’s headstrong generation, because he could not tolerate their growing aesthetic independence and what he perceived as their “opportunistic” demeanor—both declined to take part.

  In Madrid, Góngora’s admirers staged a mock auto-da-fe at which they burned effigies of books by the poet’s enemies from the baroque era—as well as those from their own period, including Valle-Inclán. After learning that the Spanish Academy had decided to snub Góngora during his anniversary year, they went to the institution at night and urinated on its walls. One evening, Lorca, Alberti, and their friend Concha Méndez, one of the generation’s few female poets, rambled through the streets of Madrid wearing enormous broad-brimmed hats while reciting Góngora’s lyrics in loud voices.

  The year culminated in a three-day homage to Góngora in Seville. Lorca was among a select group of Madrid writers asked to take part in the event as representatives of the “new Spanish literature.” On December 15 this “Brilliant Pleiad,” as a journalist had dubbed them, boarded a train for the twelve-hour trip south to Seville. “We’re like a team of soccer players,” Jorge Guillén scribbled to his wife as he sat in the first-class compartment eyeing his companions: Lorca, Alberti, Gerardo Diego, Juan Chabás, and Dámaso Alonso, a short, thickset, balding writer and scholar who was both a Góngora expert and a notorious libertine. Guillén considered himself the only “near-respectable” member of the group, because he was married. Throughout their trip to Seville the six men laughed, talked, and recited poetry. As they rumbled through Córdoba, Góngora’s birthplace, they shouted, “Viva Don Luis de Góngora!” Guillén marveled at “these strange animals called poets.”

  Late that night they pulled into Seville and were met by their host, Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a retired bullfighter who was also a connoisseur of literature. During Góngora’s tricentennial year, Sánchez Mejías had taken it upon himself to memorize the most difficult of the Cordoban poet’s works. Thin, suntanned, and athletic, Sánchez Mejías was, according to a female acquaintance, “seduction itself.” He liked to dress ostentatiously in green suits and pink shirts, with ruby cufflinks in the shape of a bull’s head. His handsome, scarred face and rugged physique testified to his long years in the bullring. On the night of their arrival in Seville, Sánchez Mejías greeted his illustrious Madrid guests and shepherded them to his ranch on the outskirts of town. They arrived well after midnight. Sánchez Mejías draped his friends in Arab robes and plied them with champagne. He and a Gypsy friend sang cante jondo, while Lorca and others recited poetry, and Dámaso Alonso got predictably drunk and began singing in English.

  Officially, the three-day Góngora celebration consisted of speeches, lectures, readings, and a photo session with the local press. Unofficially it was a nonstop party. Although it rained daily, nothing quelled the poets’ revelry. Each night they caroused with their Seville friends until dawn. At one point Lorca found himself being driven wildly through town by a fat, homely, cattleman-turned-poet named Fernando Villalón, who sped through Seville in his automobile while reciting poetry, oblivious to traffic and to Lorca’s face, which was taut with fear. During another outing, Lorca crowded into a boat with a group of friends and endeavored to sail across the swollen Guadalquivir river. As their vessel pitched and turned in the current, Lorca threw himself onto the bottom of the boat.
He was the only one of the group to admit his terror.

  Far more comfortable onstage, he gave a formal reading of Góngora’s Solitudes one evening with Rafael Alberti at the Seville Atheneum. The following night Lorca recited his own Gypsy ballads from memory. Although he expected to publish the ballads within a few months, he still thought of them as oral poetry. As he spoke, his olive-skinned face grew tense, and a sliver of black hair fell across his forehead. With one hand he ceremoniously marked out the rhythm of the poems. His audience, enthralled, stood to applaud when he had finished and waved their handkerchiefs in the air, as if at a bullfight. One friend leapt onto his seat and tossed his jacket, collar, and tie at Lorca. Later that night Lorca gave an impromptu piano concert for friends at his hotel.

  The poet Luis Cernuda, who met Lorca during the tricentennial celebrations in Seville, never forgot his vitality. Cernuda first glimpsed the Granadan as Lorca was descending the marble staircase in his hotel. Lorca wore black; his dark, cherubic face was sprinkled with moles. Cernuda thought it a face Murillo might have painted. Its light seemed to emanate from the eyes—large, eloquent, melancholy eyes that were somehow at odds with Lorca’s short, stocky body. His presence alone was charismatic. Cernuda said later that Lorca needed only to walk into a room for people’s faces to brighten and a sudden silence to descend. He was like a river, Cernuda remembered, “always the same and always different, flowing inexhaustibly.”