Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  With considerable fanfare, he returned to Granada from Madrid on April 23, 1929. Six days later, Margarita Xirgu brought her production of Mariana Pineda to town. To Lorca’s chagrin, posters bearing his name festooned the city. He disliked seeing his name displayed so brazenly in his hometown. Although he craved attention, he wanted it on his own terms, and not at the expense of his privacy. Eyeing the posters for his play, he felt as though his childhood had been plucked out by its roots, as though his dearest memories had been desecrated. “I find myself full of responsibility in a place where I never wanted to have it.” His quiet trip home the previous month must have seemed a mirage.

  During each performance of the play’s two-night run in Granada, Lorca obligingly took the stage to accept the applause of the local audience. Even though he now regarded Mariana Pineda as “the frail work of a beginner,” he was pleased with its reception. At home, he, or someone in his family, clipped a flattering front-page review of the play from the Defensor de Granada. Days earlier, the paper had hailed Lorca as the foremost Spanish-speaking poet of his time.

  Xirgu remained in Granada for several more days. On May 5, the city held a banquet in honor of the actress and the playwright. Lorca combed his hair neatly back for the occasion and put on a black suit and bow tie; Xirgu wore a dark jacket with a plump fur stole. Friends and family filled the posh Alhambra Palace Hotel. Manuel de Falla was present, as were Fernando de los Ríos, several of Lorca’s Rinconcillo colleagues, and his sixty-nine-year-old father, smiling proudly in a three-piece suit. Friends who could not attend the event, including Dalí, sent their congratulations.

  With obvious emotion, Lorca addressed the crowd. He thanked Xirgu for her support of his play and thanked his native city for having inspired the work. “If by the grace of God I become famous,” he said, “half of that fame will belong to Granada, which formed me and made me what I am: a poet from birth and unable to help it.” Then, as though speaking to himself and not to a roomful of faces he had known for most of his life, he said:

  Now, more than ever, I need the silence and spiritual density of Granada’s air in order to sustain the duel to death I am fighting with my heart and with poetry. With my heart, to free it from the impossible passion which destroys and from the deceitful shadow of the world which spatters it with sterile salt. With poetry, to construct, despite the fact that she defends herself like a virgin, the wide-awake and true poem where beauty and horror and the ineffable and the repugnant may live and collide in the midst of the most incandescent joy.

  On June 5, 1929, his thirty-first birthday, Lorca received his passport. The document erroneously listed the year of his birth as 1900, effectively changing his age to twenty-nine. He sent an extra copy of his passport photograph to Carlos Morla Lynch. The image showed Lorca staring glumly at the camera with pursed lips and one raised eyebrow. Half of his face was in shadow. The ghostly picture reminded Lorca of a murder scene. “Keep it or tear it up,” he told Morla. “It’s a melancholy Federico I’m sending you and the Federico who writes you now is a Strong Federico.”

  He claimed to be amused by the prospect of his journey to America: “New York seems horrible to me, but that’s exactly why I’m going there. I think I’ll have a good time.” He planned to remain in America for six or seven months and to spend the remainder of the year in Paris. “Papa is giving me all the money I need.” In the United States, de los Ríos would pave his way, “since, as you know, I’m a useless little fool when it comes to practical life.”

  On June 7, Lorca’s friends in Granada held a farewell banquet in his honor. The following night he caught a train to Madrid. In the capital, friends again toasted him at a private luncheon. On the morning of June 13, Lorca joined Fernando de los Ríos and the professor’s niece, Rita María, who was to accompany them for part of the journey, at Madrid’s Estación del Norte. The three intended to travel by train to Paris, and from there to England, where Rita María was to remain for the summer. From England, Lorca and de los Ríos would sail to New York.

  A handful of friends stood on the platform that morning in Madrid. It was nearly summer. Poppies were blooming in the countryside. Lorca boarded the train with de los Ríos and his niece. As the locomotive pulled away from the station, his friends waved goodbye. Soon they slipped from sight. Soon all of Madrid vanished, and only the windswept fields of Castile remained, filling the windows of his train with their undulating beauty as Lorca slowly made his way north toward France.

  Shortly before leaving Madrid, he had told Carlos Morla Lynch that he felt a renewed desire to write and “an unbridled love for poetry, for the verse that fills my soul, still trembling like a tiny antelope from the last brutal arrows.” But life was taking him in a new direction, into the cold gray swells of the Atlantic, to America. “Onward!” he wrote. “As insignificant as I may be, I believe I deserve to be loved.”

  14

  New World

  1929-30

  In Paris, Lorca drank hot chocolate and ate croissants. At the Louvre, he instructed de los Ríos’s niece to ignore the Mona Lisa. “She’s a bourgeois!” he laughed. “Don’t look at her!”

  In London, he admired the lights of Piccadilly Circus but was frightened by the cars. At street crossings he went rigid with fear. After two days in the British capital, Rita María went north to take up a summer teaching position, while Lorca and de los Ríos traveled to Oxford and then to Southampton. In Southampton they boarded the S.S. Olympic, and on the morning of June 19 they set sail for America.

  The crossing lasted six days. Lorca spent the journey basking in the summer sun until he turned “black as blackest Africa,” as he reported in a letter to his parents. “I feel content, full of joy.” But to Carlos Morla Lynch he revealed that he was homesick and depressed. “I don’t know why I left,” he told the Chilean. “I ask myself that question a hundred times a day. I look at myself in the mirror of the narrow cabin and I don’t recognize myself. I seem another Federico.”

  During the long trip he befriended a five-year-old Hungarian boy who was crossing the ocean to be with his father for the first time in his life. The innocence of the boy and the enormity of his quest stunned Lorca. Soon the child would disappear “into the belly of New York, seeking his fortune,” Lorca told his parents. “Life will be cruel or kind to him, and I will be but a remote memory, connected with the rhythm of the huge ship and the ocean.” When the two parted at the end of their journey, they both wept.

  * * *

  The day was warm and clear on June 26 when the S.S. Olympic rounded the tip of Manhattan and steamed upriver, past the gray towers of Wall Street, along the docks and warehouses and apartment buildings of New York City. Lorca had never seen anything like it. The tops of the skyscrapers seemed to him to touch the heavens.

  “The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city,” he said later, “are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.” This was the most daring urban landscape of the age, a city Fritz Lang had immortalized in Metropolis, a place that dozens of artists and writers, including some of Lorca’s Spanish contemporaries, had tried to describe. But nothing Lorca had read, seen, or heard could prepare him for the real-life spectacle of Manhattan. Paris and London were impressive, he told his parents, but New York “has given me the knockout punch.” He searched for some way of conveying to his family the grandeur of the place. Finally he hit on an image he thought they might understand. “All Granada,” he said, “would fit into three of these buildings.”

  At the pier, a handful of Spaniards waited to greet the two travelers. Among them were the current chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Columbia University, Federico de Onís, then sixty-three, and his young colleague Angel del Río, whom Lorca had known briefly in Madrid in the early 1920s. But Lorca was especially astonished to find Gabriel García Maroto, the genial painter who had published Book of Poems, among the group. Maroto had recently come to the United States for an extended visi
t and was working as a commercial artist in New York City. When he saw Lorca, he threw his arms around the sunburned Granadan and “went crazy hugging and even kissing me,” Lorca happily reported to his parents.

  His first days in America were a blur of impressions. Through his acquaintances at Columbia, and at de los Ríos’s urging, he promptly enrolled as a student at the university and took a dormitory room on the sixth floor of Furnald Hall, overlooking the main campus. From his window he could hear the rumble of traffic on nearby Broadway and the groan of foghorns in the distance. Directly below him lay a field where young men played tennis on warm summer days. He settled quickly into his spartan quarters and told his parents he enjoyed the room’s pretty view and constant breezes. But he missed Spain. He asked his family to send photographs of themselves so that he could decorate his new home.

  Because he spoke no English, Lorca relied on his Spanish friends to shepherd him through the city. Two days after his arrival, he visited Times Square at night. The sight of so many flashing lights ascending into the sky, “higher than the moon,” astounded him. He thought the people on the streets bright “streams” of sweaters and scarves, and the streets themselves “streams” of honking automobiles and radios. Unlike Madrid, where donkeys still drew carts through the city and one could see mountains in the distance, everything in New York was man-made. It was Dalí’s machine-age aesthetic come to life. Although Lorca later distanced himself from New York by pronouncing it a rootless world, his initial response was to marvel at the city’s technological splendor. He told his parents that the panorama of Broadway by night was “as impressive as a spectacle of nature.”

  He seized on stereotypes to help him understand the alien city. Times Square was an “army of windows.” Wall Street was the “spectacle of the world’s money, in all its unbridled splendor and cruelty.” New Yorkers themselves reminded him of characters he had seen in American movies: the typist with shapely legs, the gum-chewing office boy, the sidewalk beggar. Lorca was horrified by the number of drunks he saw on the city’s streets. He was mystified by Prohibition and spoke scornfully of the “teetotaling” Protestant “idiots” responsible for the nationwide ban on liquor. “Of course, I myself drink nothing without first making sure it is good,” he assured his family. The Protestant faith perplexed him. It lacked the ceremonial beauty of the Spanish Church, and he could not, he said, “get it into my head – into my Latin head” why anyone would prefer it to Catholicism. Even more bewildering was Judaism. After attending a service in a Jewish synagogue, Lorca pronounced the rite lovely but “meaningless. To me the figure of Christ seems too strong to deny.”

  Americans in general he found friendly and open, like children. “They are incredibly naive, and extremely helpful.” But the American political system disappointed him. In practice, Lorca told his parents, democracy meant “that only the very rich have maids here.” For the first time in his life, he had to sew his own buttons onto his clothes.

  He believed that having seen New York, he had seen all of America. “Everything is uniformly the same.” Americans were tenacious—a trait Lorca admired—but materialistic. Their sexual candor amazed him. In Spain, couples were discreet, but in New York, men and women kissed casually on the streets and in automobiles. American women, he said, possessed tremendous “shishpil” (he meant “sex appeal”). Like many other European visitors, Lorca perceived the modern American woman, with her short hair, revealing skirts, and unorthodox behavior, as a phenomenon unique in the world. To his parents, he talked wearily of the number of beautiful American women who pursued him in New York: “It’s a plague I have to endure.” What he did not say—but what he surely learned—was that homosexuality was also a more visible phenomenon in New York than in Spain. One of the city’s most notorious spots for clandestine homosexual encounters was located on Riverside Drive, not far from Columbia University.

  In August, as planned, Fernando de los Ríos left New York. Lorca stayed on, alone except for his new circle of Spanish friends at Columbia. He told his family he was in good spirits—well fed, and surrounded by people who took an interest in him. “I can see now what a good thing it is to have become a man of some fame: all doors are opened to you and everyone treats you with the utmost respect.”

  He wrote home regularly. His letters were relentlessly buoyant. He explained to his parents that he rose early every morning to study English and then went to English class. In the afternoons he studied or wrote, ate supper in the university dining hall at the unaccustomed hour of seven o’clock (in Spain, supper rarely began before nine-thirty), and then took walks or went to parties. “There are more parties and gatherings here than anyplace else in the world. Americans cannot stand to be alone.” To judge by his letters, Manhattan’s social and cultural life revolved around Lorca. He was “always turning down invitations.” (If you are not careful, he complained, “the old women intellectuals here will devour you.”) At parties he played the piano and sang, and he soon began teaching popular songs to Spanish students at Columbia—a task he loved. He described his official title as “Director of the Mixed Choruses of the Spanish Institute of the United States of America.”

  He pretended to enjoy his studies. He told his parents he carried a dictionary around with him all day long, because the nice Americans were always striking up conversations, and he wanted to participate. “Naturally, each question and each answer require fifteen minutes of word hunting in the dictionary. But it is the only way to learn.” In truth, Lorca acquired almost no English during his stay in America. He learned to say “ice cream” and “Times Square” (pronouncing it “Tim-es Es-quare,” according to a Spanish-speaking acquaintance). He learned how to order ham and eggs in a restaurant, and because it was the only thing he knew how to order, he ate ham and eggs much of the time—or so he claimed. In English class, he spent most of his time mimicking his teacher’s gestures and accent. His favorite expression, a friend recalled, was “I don’t understand anything.” Lorca would shout the phrase while standing in the middle of the street, arms flailing, his face red with laughter.

  Contrary to what he told his parents, he spoke Spanish all day long, with anyone. He seemed afraid of English, as if the new language might rob him of the old. At Columbia, he communicated with elevator attendants by extravagant gestures—deep bows and pirouettes. In social situations he sometimes got by in broken French. He later bragged that during his stay in New York, he had made his way around the city by hanging a sign from his neck with his destination printed clearly on it in English.

  Troubled by Lorca’s inability to grasp the language, Federico de Onís and Angel del Río arranged for a graduate student named Sofía Megwinoff to tutor him in English. Lorca expressed delight at the idea. He told his parents he hoped the young woman was pretty; if not, he would refuse to work with her. Happily, Sofia was an attractive brunette with big eyes, who charmed Lorca with her spellbinding recitations of works by Edgar Allan Poe. As she spoke, Lorca closed his mouth and hummed along with the poems, tapping out their rhythm with his hands. He understood nothing of their content.

  Sofía quickly realized that Lorca had neither the aptitude nor the desire to learn English, and so the two spent their time together exploring the city. Typically Lorca showed up late for their meetings; once, after missing an appointment altogether, he wrote Sofía a note blaming her for having left him “in the lurch.” He signed himself, “The betrayed Poet.” On another occasion he went on at length about his former girlfriend in Spain, a woman with whom he had been deeply in love, but who had abused him by scratching his face. He had retaliated by grabbing her long hair and dragging her across the floor, he said. Sofía believed the story until Onís and del Río assured her it was a complete fabrication. Lorca had invented the tale, they suggested, in order to make himself seem more interesting.

  His true classroom was New York. Dressed in sporty new American attire—an Oxford-cloth shirt and tie, baggy pants, a white tennis sweater—he took to
the streets. He visited the aquarium and the zoo (“where I felt like a child”) and made repeated visits to dime stores, where he sometimes sat on the floor and played with toy horses or automobiles. On crowded subway cars he occasionally feigned lameness in order to get a seat. As the underground train clattered along in the dark, he liked to wag his hand beneath his chin like a cowbell and intone, “Talán, talán, talán.”

  He told his parents he was adapting well to his new environment. “I don’t see much of the Spaniards,” he lied. “I prefer to live the life of an American.” In truth, he dropped by Angel del Río’s apartment nearly every day and often shared his meals with the young professor and his wife, Amelia. He also befriended a Mexican heiress, María Rivas Blair, and took part in weekly gatherings at the offices of the Spanish-language magazine Alhambra. He saw both del Río and Gabriel García Maroto at these tertulias, as well as the Spanish poet, León Felipe, and a Puerto Rican intellectual named Angel Flores. Afterward the group often dined together at a cheap Spanish restaurant near Chinatown.

  One night over supper, Flores noticed that Lorca looked glum. He suggested that after the meal they both go to Brooklyn to visit the American poet Hart Crane, whom Flores knew. Lorca agreed, and the two took off by foot across the Brooklyn Bridge to Crane’s apartment. The Illinois-born Crane was one year younger than Lorca and had lived in New York since 1923. Earlier in his life he had labored briefly as a factory worker in Cleveland, Ohio; he loved machinery and believed poetry must absorb the aesthetic of the machine age, must “surrender, at least temporarily, to the sensations of urban life.” In New York, Crane was at work on a long series of poems inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge, whose “bound cable strands” and “silver terraces” loomed outside his apartment. His first book of poems, White Buildings, had appeared in 1926, and he would publish The Bridge in 1930. But despite his literary success, Crane was a profoundly tormented man. Poetry sustained him in a life that otherwise teetered on the brink of collapse. When he wasn’t writing, he spent much of his time engaged in fleeting homosexual encounters and alcohol binges. In 1932, three years after meeting Lorca, Crane committed suicide by leaping from a ship into the Caribbean.