Work became his balm. He wrote “fast and furiously,” turning out prose poems, drawings, and poetry. Through “sheer willpower” he believed he could save himself from defeat. He struggled to avoid the confessional mode, which for aesthetic as well as personal reasons he felt he must reject. “I’m going through one of the most painful periods I’ve experienced in my life,” he told Jorge Zalamea, a twenty-three-year-old Colombian poet, who had come to Spain that year with his country’s diplomatic corps. Lorca had recently met and come to trust Zalamea. He described to him the difficulty of “trying constantly to keep your state of mind from filtering into your poetry, because it would play on you the dirty trick of exposing the purest part of yourself to the gazes of those who should never see it.”
For “reasons of discipline,” Lorca returned to the exactitude of the ode form. He renewed work on his ode to Christ and at the same time began work on a new ode, the “Ode and Mockery of Sesostris and Sardanapalus,” an allegorical exploration of homosexual love. Each ode, Lorca said, corresponded to a different facet of his personality. The ode to Christ mirrored his soul; the ode to Sesostris reflected his “eroticism.”
He was not the first artist to exploit the figure of Sardanapalus as an emblem of erotic love. A legendary Assyrian king known for his luxuriant effeminacy, Sardanapalus had long served as a symbol of bacchanalian excess. Augustine had condemned his debauchery, Verlaine paid tribute to his libertinism, Byron turned him into a bourgeois dandy, and precisely one century before Lorca began work on his ode, the painter Eugène Delacroix made Sardanapulus the subject of one of his greatest canvases, The Death of Sardanapalus, a twofold celebration of sex and death that shocked viewers—both in its time and for decades afterward. Like Lorca, Delacroix had turned to Sardanapalus at a moment when his own impulses and passions threatened to overwhelm him. “I am a slave of my senses,” the artist remarked not long before starting the canvas.
Lorca’s ode pairs Sardanapalus with the more obscure figure of Sesostris, an Egyptian pharaoh renowned for his military vigor. Collectively the two suggest the opposition between effeminate and manly homosexuality, a topic of growing interest to Lorca. His use of imagery in the “Ode and Mockery of Sesostris and Sardanapalus” also points to Lorca’s deepening preoccupation with the sterility of love between men. “Blackberries of light, long needles constrict your ashen waist,” he writes of Sardanapalus. “Flowers of mad rock and dark water / cover the fields of your solitudes.” He had addressed the same theme in the poem “Two Norms.”
As he worked on the ode, the poem seemed to Lorca “full of humor and lament and Dionysiac rhythm.” He talked eagerly of publishing an entire book of odes, in part because these stately, dispassionate, erudite poems were “the exact opposite of the Gypsy Ballads.” But despite his pleasure in the form, he neglected to finish the “Ode and Mockery of Sesostris and Sardanapalus.” He may have feared the work’s references were too revealing. Or he may simply have lost interest. In any case, he completed just twelve stanzas of the ode.
One moment he was buoyant and the next downcast. He sent terse notes to close friends, pleading for compassion. To plump, generous Sebastian Gasch, the art critic whose affection and admiration had proved such a boon to Lorca’s drawings, he wrote, “I’m going through a huge emotional crisis (that’s right) from which I hope to emerge cured … This letter is nothing more than a cry and a tight embrace from Federico.” To Melchor Fernández Almagro, who for years had watched over Lorca’s career with the devotion of an apostle, he exclaimed, “You’ll always be my confessor!” To Rafael Martínez Nadal, his confidant and sometime amanuensis in Madrid, he urged, “Don’t get involved with anyone, Rafael. It’s better to be cruel with others and not to have to suffer calvary, passion, and death afterward. … It’s a sad fact that the blows a poet receives are the seed of his work, his ladder of light.” He begged Nadal not to forsake him. “I’m very isolated and at times still terribly sad. Every day I learn something more about love. The more inflamed I become, the less I understand. Don’t stop writing to me.”
Lorca’s newest correspondent was the Colombian Jorge Zalamea, who revered Lorca’s work, and soon after meeting Lorca asked for copies of his poems. “They’ll bring me your necessary presence,” he said. Because Zalamea was serious and reflective, and because he, too, was in the midst of a dire emotional conflict that summer, Lorca found it easy to confide in him. Their correspondence—of which only fragments remain—was frank, for Zalamea assured Lorca that he would not show his letters to anyone: “I love you and I love myself too much to play games with famous manuscripts.” The two communicated by innuendo. “As for E …” wrote Zalamea, in an apparent reference to Emilio Aladrén, “I haven’t seen him again.” It comforted Lorca to know he was not alone in his unhappiness. “I too have had a very bad time. Very bad,” he told Zalamea. “One needs to have the amount of joy God has given me not to succumb before the number of conflicts that have assaulted me lately. But God never abandons me.”
He longed in particular to see and talk to Dalí. For the third consecutive summer he implored the painter to visit him in Granada. When it became clear that Dalí could not—or did not want to—visit, Lorca began planning his own trip to Barcelona. “I want to be with all of you,” he wrote wistfully to Sebastian Gasch. Meanwhile, he resumed work on a third issue of gallo. He intended to dedicate the entire magazine to Dalí.
The artist had changed dramatically in the past year. Ever more enamored of surrealism, the erstwhile Apollonian had begun to espouse anarchic cultural acts: the demolition of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, the abolition of traditional Catalan dance. The previous year he had informed Lorca that “internal conflicts” were dead. “The soul, complexes, Freud, all of it is shit.” Aesthetically he and Lorca were drifting farther apart. At times Dalí appeared to resent Lorca’s fame and to regret his waning influence on the poet. He seemed jealous of Lorca’s success—and jealous, too, of his involvement with Aladrén.
In early September 1928, Dalí sent Lorca a seven-page critique of Gypsy Ballads. He scribbled his thoughts on the back of a set of business forms from his father’s office and riddled his remarks with arrows, underlined words, corrections, and sketches of human torsos and faces. Although he admitted to admiring one or two poems in Lorca’s book (as he told Sebastian Gasch, he also liked the collection’s “unconscious erotic inspiration”), he found the writing folkloric and sentimental. “You think perhaps that certain images are arresting or you may find an increased dose of the irrational in your stuff but I can tell you that your poetry does little more than illustrate clichés of the most stereotypical and conformist kind.”
Dalí believed Lorca’s ballads reinforced a traditional view of reality, when instead Lorca should have sought to escape reality. Why must a rider necessarily sit astride a horse? the artist asked. Why must the horse gallop? What if the horse’s reins were in fact extensions of the rider’s hands? What if “the little hairs on the rider’s balls” were faster than the horse?
One has to allow things to be
free
of the conventional ideas which the intellect forces on them. Then these charming little things will work by themselves in accordance with their real and
consubstantial
manner of being.
Much of Dalí’s argument sprang directly from an article he was to publish the following month titled “Reality and Surreality.” But while the painter was more favorably disposed toward surrealism than ever before, he was not yet ready to endorse the movement. “Surrealism is one of the means of Escape,” he advised Lorca. “But it’s Escape itself that is the important thing.”
In the midst of his harangue Dalí abruptly interrupted himself. “Let’s let it drop,” he urged. He was “less and less” able to express his thoughts in letters. Articles—long diatribes on aesthetic issues—had become his forum of choice. With sudden tenderness he addressed Lorca directly, invoking the ciphered language they alone cou
ld decode, gently reminding his old friend of the affection and intimacy that bound them. “Federiquito,” he wrote, “in your book which I’ve taken with me to the mineral places around here to read, I’ve seen you, little beastie that you are, little erotic beastie, with your sex and the little eyes of your body”—here Dalí was alluding to a passage in Lorca’s “Ballad of the Marked Man,” a poem Lorca had dedicated to Emilio Aladrén—“and your hairs and your terror of death and your wish that if you die gentlemen will know about it … your thumb in close correspondence with your prick and with the dampness of the lakes of saliva of certain species of hairy planets that do exist.” The last passage appears verbatim in Dalí’s essay “Reality and Surreality.”
Dalí knew Lorca as no one else did:
I love you for what your book reveals you to be, which is quite the opposite of the idea the putrid philistines have put out about you, that is a bronzed Gypsy with black hair, childish heart, etc. etc. … You, little beastie, with your little fingernails, with your body sometimes half possessed by death, in which death wells up from your nails to your shoulders in the most sterile of efforts!
The artist continued to “believe” (he underlined the word three times) in Lorca’s “inspiration, in your sweat, in your astronomical fatality.” He assured Lorca that once he had lost his fear of things and learned to “shit” on his fellow poets, to “give up RHYME, in short, Art as understood by the swine—you’ll produce witty, horrifying … intense, poetic things such as no other poet could.”
13
Rain from the Stars
1928-29
Lorca made light of Dalí’s aesthetic attack. He praised the artist’s “intelligence, grace, and acuity” and described his seven-page harangue as “a sharp and arbitrary letter that raises an interesting poetic problem.” If anything, the letter, with its blatant homoerotic allusions, heightened his desire to see Dalí. As for Gypsy Ballads, Lorca professed to have lost interest in the collection. “It died in my hands in the most tender way,” he said.
His new work absorbed him. “All day long I turn out poems like a factory,” he told Jorge Zalamea. Heeding Dalí’s call for a poetic “escape” from conventional ideas and literary clichés, he began writing what he described as “vein-opening poetry, a poetry that escapes reality with an emotion reflecting all my love of things and my joking about things.” In his more private search for an escape from the emotional and sexual conflicts of the preceding year, Lorca looked forward to the arrival of fall, “which gives me life.” He longed to restore both meaning and order to the charade his existence had become. He battled against melancholy. There were days when his mood matched the sodden gray skies over Granada, days when he felt as if his life was about to end.
In his letter on Gypsy Ballads, Dalí had referred bluntly to Lorca’s physical body: his “hairs,” “fingernails,” “shoulders,” “sweat,” “thumb,” “prick.” It was precisely this body, and its intractable demands, that Lorca now sought to escape, much as he had in adolescence. Shortly after hearing from Dalí, he embarked on a set of prose poems, works he claimed were the result of a “new spiritualistic manner, pure disembodied emotion, detached from logical control, but—careful! careful!—with a tremendous poetic logic,” he explained to Sebastian Gasch. “It’s not surrealism—careful!—the clearest consciousness illuminates them.”
Despite his disclaimer, Lorca’s new poems did verge on surrealism. Dense, depersonalized, full of numbers and jargon, they reflect the movement’s scorn for reality and esteem for the unconscious imagery of dreams. Dalí now defined surrealism as not “another ism, but the blossoming of the most intensely spiritual state that ever existed,” and by this standard Lorca’s “spiritualistic” poems of 1928 were virtually surrealist. In late September Lorca published two of the poems, “Swimmer Submerged” and “Suicide in Alexandria,” in the avantgarde journal L’Amic de les Arts. Dalí served on the magazine’s editorial board.
Since attending the Góngora celebrations the previous year, Lorca had revised his aesthetic thinking, and now distinguished between poetry of the “imagination,” as exemplified by Góngora, and the superior poetry of “inspiration.” As Lorca saw it, the former reaffirms existing truths by adhering to reality’s bounds, while the latter escapes reality by casting off the imagination’s chains and yielding to a world of mystery, a world where inspiration falls like a gift from the skies, uncontrolled and inexplicable. It was this second type of poetry that Lorca hoped to create.
He was still trying to clarify his thoughts on the subject when in mid-October he agreed to christen the Granada Atheneum’s 1928 season with a lecture, “Imagination, Inspiration, Escape.” Most of the city’s intellectual set attended the event. Flowers and tapestries trimmed the crowded lecture hall. Many of the women in the audience held bouquets.
At first hesitant to launch into his difficult topic, Lorca warned his audience that he did not want “to outline but to suggest.” His own thoughts on the nature of poetic “truth” had shifted so often in recent years that he scarcely knew what to believe. But he understood the poet’s mission clearly: “to animate, in the precise sense of the word: to give life to.” As a poet he remained committed to the ideal of “pure” poetry. Yet he no longer believed, as Góngora had, that such poetry could be achieved through traditional metaphor. Poetry must free itself from the “puzzle of the image and from the planes of reality.” It must ascend to an “ultimate plane of purity and simplicity”—the plane of “escape,” poetry’s last and purest realm. Although Lorca derived the term from Dalí, both Ortega y Gasset and the Spanish ultraists had also embraced the notion of “escape.”
Metaphor, Lorca insisted, must give way to the hecho poético—the “poetic event”—a phenomenon at once illogical and incomprehensible, as miraculous as “rain from the stars.” In a subsequent version of his lecture, he cited a passage from one of his own Gypsy poems, the “Sleepwalking Ballad,” as an example of an hecho poético. “If you ask me why I wrote ‘A thousand glass tambourines / were wounding the dawn,’ I will tell you that I saw them, in the hands of angels and trees, but I won’t be able to say more than that, much less explain their meaning. And that’s how it should be.”
He regarded the hecho poético as one of several means of reaching the purest plane of poetry, the “poetry of escape.” The surrealists sought to achieve “escape” through dreams and the unconscious, a method Lorca found pure but unclear. “We Latins want sharp profiles and visible mystery. Form and sensuality.” As much as he admired Dalí and respected the artist’s views on surrealism, Lorca refused to subscribe to any such movement. He preferred to align himself loosely with his peers in the Generation of ’27—and even with Juan Ramón Jiménez, whom Dalí reviled—writers who focused exclusively on “reducing poetry to the creation of the poetic event,” writers who shunned dogma.
Although the Defensor de Granada proclaimed his talk “a complete aesthetic theory,” Lorca had only begun to shape his argument. Two weeks later he returned to the topic during a second Atheneum event, “gallo Night,” an informal gathering aimed at bolstering support for his magazine, which had been foundering since the publication of its second issue in April. Throughout the summer Lorca and his friends had spent long evenings sitting under the sycamore trees at the Alameda Café, outlining the magazine’s third issue. Lorca hoped to devote the number exclusively to Dalí. But he had found it impossible, in the midst of the emotional and professional chaos brought on by the publication of his Gypsy Ballads, to concentrate on the magazine. One of his fellow editors accused him of no longer loving gallo, and there was some truth to the charge. Nonetheless, Lorca mustered a show of enthusiasm for the undertaking on “gallo Night.”
Each of the magazine’s six editors spoke during the course of the evening. They talked about creation and anarchy, the advent of the machine age and their own embrace of a playful, depersonalized art. Lorca was last to take the stage. He titled his short discourse “Sketch
de la nueva pintura,” or “Sketch of the New Painting.” A brief, subjective summary of the state of contemporary art, his talk reiterated the ideas he had expressed two weeks earlier in his lecture on imagination and inspiration. Lorca argued that while Picasso and Braque, like Góngora, had liberated visual art through their creation of startling images, painting had subsequently become sadly cerebral and must evolve. “Where are we headed?” he asked. “We are heading toward instinct, toward chance, toward pure inspiration.” In short, visual art was heading toward surrealism, a movement Lorca praised, for it had freed painting from cubism’s “disciplined abstractions” and was now steering it toward a “mystical, uncontrolled period of supreme beauty” where the “inexpressible begins to be expressed.” Although he refrained from using the term, Lorca was again describing the notion of “escape.”
He illustrated his talk with slides of work by Picasso, Gris, de Chirico, Kandinsky, Miró, and, above all, Dalí, whom Lorca now categorized as a “surrealist.” Afterward he told Sebastian Gasch that he had paid Dalí “a great tribute” that evening. “I hope to go to Barcelona soon. I really want to see you and to see my friends.”
Three weeks after delivering his “Sketch,” Lorca went to Madrid, effectively stranding his fellow gallo editors in the midst of their work on the third issue of the magazine. Quietly gallo folded. Lorca did not care.
In Madrid he settled into a pension with his brother, who was in the midst of studying for his diplomatic exams. Jorge Guillén ran into Lorca shortly after his arrival and found him “more affected, more self-centered” than before, “but terribly charming and vivacious.” After his three-month stay in Granada, Lorca was for the moment content to be back in the capital and eager to see his friends. His financial situation had improved as a result of Gypsy Ballads, and he sought ways to share the bounty. One day he barged into the offices of the Revista de Occidente, announced that he intended to treat a few of his friends to lunch, and demanded a portion of his royalties. The secretary informed him that funds were unavailable. “What do you mean there’s no money?” Lorca cried. “Then this isn’t the Revista de Occidente, it’s the Miseria de Occidente!” In the end he got his money.
Lorca Page 26