Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  The tricentennial of Luis de Góngora’s death marked Lorca’s generation from that year forward. Collectively, the young poets who attended the Seville homage—as well as several who did not, including Pedro Salinas, Emilio Prados, Manuel Altolaguirre, and Vicente Aleixandre—became known as the Generation of ’27. Although in time their devotion to Góngora waned, and among themselves they sometimes squabbled over ideas and personalities, their respect and affection for one another endured. “We love each other, we adore each other, we’re all of us the same person,” Lorca declared several years after the Góngora tricentennial. “And they’re all such saints!” he said of his fellow poets. “They look after my fame and my glory like a flower, like a flower.”

  During the tricentennial festivities in Seville, Lorca sketched a set of “astronomical maps of poetry” to show to his colleagues, a tongue-in-cheek visualization of the “Brilliant Pleiad” he and his peers were thought to be. According to a friend who saw the maps, Lorca brashly depicted himself as “the star” of Spain’s poetic heavens, “surrounded by an immoderate and by all accounts fabulous number of satellites.”

  12

  Madness of Breeze and Trill

  1928

  Lorca returned to Granada in time for Christmas. Having been away from home much of the previous year, he could again savor Granada’s unique beauty—the runnels of water in the Generalife gardens, the way the sun swept the vega clean each afternoon. The wintry town made him feel “at peace with myself.”

  In the first weeks of 1928, he resolved at last to bring out his “anti-local” magazine, gallo, and in doing so to pay ironic tribute to the city he alternately loved and despised. He assembled an editorial staff—including his brother, who agreed to serve as the magazine’s official director—and resumed his efforts to sell subscriptions and solicit literary and artistic submissions from friends. Dalí provided a masthead, several drawings, and his long prose poem on Saint Sebastian. Jorge Guillén and Melchor Fernández Almagro also wrote pieces for the magazine’s debut issue, and Lorca drafted a facetious “History of this gallo,” stressing the need to jolt Granada from its lethargy.

  The stylish black-and-white magazine premiered on March 9, 1928, and according to Lorca provoked “an absolute scandal” among the local bourgeoisie, who did not know what to make of the irreverent publication. Snide references to Granada appeared throughout the magazine, as did self-consciously avant-garde terms such as “Charleston” and “Kodak.” One story was titled “Lucy in Sexquilandia.” But gallo had its conventional side. To offset the costs of publication, Lorca and his colleagues had sold advertising space to a handful of local businesses—among them a candy shop, a clothing store, and a General Motors outlet selling Cadillacs—establishments that typified the very bourgeoisie the magazine’s creators sought to mock. In a later issue Lorca gamely noted the distinction between those granadinos “who have given us money” and those he deemed “putrefactions,” decaying emblems of the outmoded past.

  The magazine’s twenty-two pages still smelled of ink when Lorca took gallo in his hands for the first time and cradled it, he said, “the way you hold a baby.” He shrugged off those friends, including Dalí, who criticized the magazine’s parochial focus on Granada. “As I’m its father, I can’t judge it. It’s dear to me,” Lorca countered. He was pleased to have joined the ranks of his peers who were publishing small literary magazines in cities throughout Spain. In Granada, where the first issue of gallo sold out in two days (or so Lorca alleged), the Defensor de Granada hailed the arrival of this “hostile new cock” in the city’s staid literary “chicken coop.” At a private banquet to celebrate the magazine’s publication, a live rooster strutted through the dining room. Hoping to stoke the fires of controversy, the Defensor de Granada published a detailed account of the celebration.

  Lorca sparked further debate when, one week after issuing gallo, he and his editorial staff released a second magazine, an “anti-avant-garde” review called Pavo, or “Turkey.” Printed on just one sheet of newsprint, Pavo was a genuinely avant-garde gesture of self-negation, an utter spoof of gallo and everything for which gallo stood. Its contents included a parody of Dalí’s “Saint Sebastian” (written by one “Enrique Solí, Swine Slaughterer”) as well as a series of mock avant-garde poems meant to prove the “ease, insipidity, and senselessness” of the new literature.

  Although the Defensor de Granada wished the “succulent” review a “long and prosperous life,” Pavo vanished after one issue. Weeks later Lorca published a second gallo. By Pavo’s standards, its contents were orthodox: works of art and literary criticism alternated with local poetry and prose. The magazine’s most radical offering was Dalí’s “Anti-Artistic Manifesto,” which Lorca had helped draft the previous summer. But although his name had appeared among the manifesto’s original signatories in Catalunya, Lorca refused to attach his name to the work when it appeared in gallo—perhaps because in his hometown he felt uncomfortable endorsing Dalí’s cry for the annihilation of tradition. (Elsewhere in the magazine, gallo’s editors called for the preservation of Granada’s oldest buildings.) In Madrid, Pedro Salinas was incensed to learn that Lorca had published Dalí’s manifesto. “To me, these young Andalusians are becoming more like weathercocks every day,” he said.

  But Lorca’s embrace of the avant-garde was real. The second issue of gallo featured two of his experimental prose dialogues, the first a provocative account of a young woman’s encounter with two men, and the second his droll homage to silent film, “Buster Keaton’s Stroll,” in which the film star murders his four children and then rides off on a bicycle while the skyline of Philadelphia shimmers in the distance. With its dreamlike structure and pointed references to gramophones and Singer sewing machines, the short script reads like one of Dalí’s letters to Lorca. Both men revered Keaton; Dalí, thought him the essence of “anti-art.”

  The second issue of gallo also contained a fragment of a novel-in-progress by Francisco García Lorca. To Lorca’s delight, his twenty-five-year-old brother had been secretly writing a book for more than a year, and although Paco had begged him not to broadcast news of the project “to the four winds,” Lorca could not contain his excitement. He told Jorge Guillén that his brother’s novel was

  marvelous. And it’s nothing like any of my things. I’m not blinded by the infinite love I have for him. … My brother was inhibited by my personality, you understand? He couldn’t blossom next to me, because my momentum and my art frightened him a bit. He had to get away, travel, meet the world on its own terms. But there it is. The poor thing is studying for a professional position in I don’t know what field of law, and he’ll succeed so as not to disappoint my parents.

  Lorca gently overlooked his brother’s shortcomings as a writer. Although the younger man’s novel shows touches of originality, it is largely prosaic, and lacks the prodigious vision of Lorca’s work. Paco never finished the book, but completed his doctorate in law, as Lorca predicted, and pursued a diplomatic career. In time he became a perceptive critic of Spanish literature and an ardent spokesman for his older brother’s work. Privately, he wrote poetry—simple, deeply felt poems about nature, family, grief, and love. He kept his poems in a desk drawer, hidden from his family. Not wishing to exploit his brother’s renown, or perhaps sharing Lorca’s aversion to print, he made no effort to publish his verse. Nonetheless, he could not refrain from occasionally echoing his brother. “Yes,” wrote Francisco García Lorca in one of his poems, “life is hard and love, impossible.”

  Lorca continued to miss Dalí. He yearned to go to Barcelona once the painter had finished his year’s tour of duty in the army, but Dalí neither encouraged nor invited him. Engrossed in preparations for his first exhibition in Paris, his letters slackened. Dispirited, Lorca told Sebastian Gasch, “If I don’t go, it won’t be my fault, but the fault of Destiny, or of some contrary wind from which no one is free.”

  Denied Dalí’s company, Lorca became infatuated with an
other artist, Emilio Aladren, a slender twenty-one-year-old from Madrid, whose oval face and sultry eyes bore a dramatic resemblance to Dalí’s. Aladren idolized Lorca, with theatrical devotion. After their first meeting in 1925, he begged Lorca to “write to me, write to me every day!” In early 1928, when Lorca chose to remain in Granada rather than return to Madrid, Aladren sent a peevish note. “I knew you wouldn’t come. Granada must have some hold on you that Madrid lacks.”

  By then the two were regular correspondents. Aladren thanked Lorca for the many letters, postcards, and telegrams he had received from the poet and confessed that he had twice tried to phone Lorca in Granada. Lorca was flattered by Aladrén’s fawning attention and captivated by his good looks, and against his better judgment, he became obsessed with the young artist. Although he refused to name the source of his trouble, Lorca told the poet Gerardo Diego in February that he’d recently had to overcome “ten or twelve conflicts of a literary, amorous, etc., etc., nature” in order to work. To Sebastian Gasch, he talked of the “emotional conflicts” that assaulted him whenever he went to Madrid. In Granada, by contrast, he felt “cleansed.”

  As in adolescence, he turned to poetry in an effort to resolve, or transcend, the conflict between flesh and spirit that plagued him. In early 1928 he began drafting an immense ode on the topic of Christ’s martyrdom. As a teenager he had written compassionately of an eighteen-year-old Christ who longed for love; at twenty-nine, Lorca now wrote of the savior whose death had redeemed humankind. Newly consumed by carnal desire, he empathized with the human Jesus who had experienced temptation and understood its pull. Two months into his poem, Lorca sent Jorge Guillén a photograph of himself taken during a recent excursion to the Alpujarras. “Here I am in Pitres, a village without voice or mountain doves,” he jotted on the back of the picture. “Crucified in the Y of the tree.”

  In the same letter, he promised to send Guillén two new poems, a pair of ten-line décimas he had just completed and planned to dedicate to Guillén, a master of the form. Lorca’s work on the décimas coincided with his work on the ode to Christ; in each he sought the protective constraints of formal metrics and opaque imagery. The previous year he had observed that when Góngora sought to veil his “erotic feeling toward women (which he had to hide because of his clerical habit),” he did so through stylization, so that a given poem’s eroticism reached “inviolable heights.” The décima allowed Lorca to do the same. As brief and rigorous as the sonnet, the ten-line stanza forced him to compress his thinking, and enabled him through metaphor to express his volatile subject: the two ideals of homosexual and heterosexual love.

  He titled the décimas “Two Norms.” In each he outlined a love at once noble and unattainable. Homosexual love—a love the writer has known before and finds again in the person of a radiant adolescent—is fleeting, sterile, cold, and forbidden, but irresistible to the poet, who seeks a sanctuary, an “orchard,” where the youth’s beauty can flourish:

  Yesterday’s norm encountered

  upon my present night.

  Light of adolescence,

  you oppose the snow.

  The stealthy pupils of my eyes

  do not want to take you in:

  two brown girls of floating moon

  and my open heart.

  But my love looks for the orchard

  where your style does not die.

  Above his manuscript draft of the poem Lorca sketched a moon, its pale, reflected light suggestive of a nighttime love, a faint embodiment of its daytime counterpart.

  Above his draft of the second décima Lorca sketched a sun, an emblem of a different kind of love, a fruitful and enduring passion of which the poet longs to partake but cannot. Unable to engage in a relationship with the woman to whom the poem is addressed, the speaker seeks the pure, implicitly sterile “madness” of homosexual love:

  Norm of breast and hip

  under the stretching bough;

  old and newly born,

  virtue of the Spring.

  My naked body yearns to be

  the dahlia of your destiny,

  bee, murmur or wine

  of your number and madness.

  But my love goes on seeking

  pure madness of breeze and trill.

  The poems were Lorca’s first attempt to articulate his growing acceptance of a love he had for years tried to repudiate. He published “Two Norms” in a small literary journal in May 1928. Among trusted friends, he became more candid about his sexuality. “You don’t know what it is to suffer for masculine beauty,” he told former Residencia roommate José Antonio Rubio Sacristán.

  His understanding of same-sex love—and of love in general—sprang not only from his affair with Aladrén but from his familiarity with Plato’s Symposium, a work Lorca began rereading in 1928. According to Rafael Martínez Nadal, Lorca became fascinated by Plato’s concept of “oneness,” of the union, through eros, of two disparate halves. “If oneness is the perfect fusion of two halves, he said to me, then we men are jungles of halves eternally in search of the impossible union,” Martínez Nadal recalled. At the same time, Lorca came to embrace the Platonic notion that homosexual love is both legitimate and inborn. In the appendix to his copy of the Symposium, he underlined the following passage from Pascal’s “Discourse on the Passions of Love”: “We are born with one type of love in our hearts, which develops accordingly as understanding is perfected, and which leads us to love that which we think is beautiful, without our ever having been told what it consists of.”

  To Lorca, Emilio Aladrén possessed the exotic looks of a South Sea islander. The artist’s dark face was actually a mingling of cultures. He had the high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes of his Slavic grandmother, and the jet black hair of his Cuban grandfather and Spanish father. Lorca thought him a cross “between Russian and Tahitian.” To others he resembled a portrait by Gauguin.

  He was impulsive, headstrong, and grasping. At Madrid’s School of Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving, where he had enrolled as a sculpture student, instructors complained repeatedly about Aladrén’s “lack of discipline and frivolous behavior.” When he spoke, he gestured effusively; when he wrote, he babbled. In a fatuous nine-page letter to Lorca he confided, “Federico I’d like to be frank with you I don’t know if I can be. At times I think, these days I’ve thought about it, well not now, but as there’s been a moment when I’ve thought about it and admitted it, like a machine I remember it and write it to you, and the thing is, just imagine, I’ve thought that I didn’t understand how you’d become interested in me.” Pages later he added, “I’m beginning to have a lot of ambition. I’m also an idiot and you’re really good-natured to put up with me.”

  Lorca found Aladrén’s calculated air of vulnerability bewitching, and when he returned to Madrid for an extended stay in late April 1928, he and the artist became inseparable companions. Lorca took the twenty-one-year-old with him to cafés, introduced him to friends, and paid for his drinks and meals. He professed great faith in Aladrén’s meager talents. (He was said to have wooed the sculptor away from a female classmate by praising his “fabulous” gifts and his “Russian temperament.”) Aladrén referred demurely to Lorca as “my springtime friend of a recently blooming Residencia garden.” In a photograph he can be seen draping one arm possessively over Lorca’s shoulder and gazing at the poet with shining eyes. Lorca, unaccustomedly dashing in a double-breasted jacket and pin-striped pants, stares regally into space, shoulders squared, hands folded stiffly in front of him.

  They met nearly every night that spring, often in Aladrén’s studio, where they listened to cante jondo records and drank gin. Later Aladrén sometimes tucked a bottle of gin into his pocket, and the pair wandered off into the streets. One morning shortly before dawn, Martínez Nadal ran into them as they came careening down a street, singing and laughing. “Have you seen the new circus?” Lorca cried out to Nadal. “Emilio! Take off your raincoat and roll on the ground!”

  The p
avement was damp, and beneath his raincoat Aladrén wore a pearl-gray suit. But to Nadal’s astonishment, the young man obediently dropped to the ground, uttered a leonine roar, and began turning somersaults. “Emilio, up!” Lorca barked. Aladrén rose. Lorca helped him on with his coat. Heaving with laughter, they took off arm in arm into the night.

  Friends tried to steer Lorca away from the artist. Aladrén was worthless and manipulative, a “tramp,” they warned. But Lorca had been so utterly seduced by Emilio’s youth and beauty that he allowed the sculptor to use him shamelessly. When Aladrén carved a lifelike plaster bust of him that spring, Lorca spent weeks trying to persuade friends in the press to publish a photograph of the work. “I’d like it to be a surprise for a good friend of mine, a new artist,” he told a colleague at ABC, one of Madrid’s most prominent dailies. “This with the utmost discretion. I blush somewhat to ask that it appear in the papers as a photograph of me, but as I said, it’s really about someone else, even though I’m the model.” In the end, only Madrid’s Gaceta Literaria and the ever-loyal Defensor de Granada agreed to print a picture of the mediocre work. An accompanying caption—very probably supplied by Lorca himself—identified the sculptor as “one of the most brilliant and promising young men in the coming generation of artists.”