Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  When Flores and Lorca arrived at Crane’s apartment that afternoon in 1929, the American writer answered the door. He was a slight man with big hands, a large face, and dark, melancholy eyes. Behind him, Flores spotted half a dozen inebriated sailors lounging about the room. Crane himself was drunk, but he welcomed the two men into his home, and when Flores introduced him to Lorca, Crane made an attempt to converse with the Spaniard. Neither writer could speak the other’s language, but with Flores’s help they managed to communicate and eventually got along in pidgin French. Crane asked if Lorca would like to stay on that afternoon, and Lorca indicated that he would. Flores then left. On his way out the door, he glanced back and saw Crane in the midst of one group of sailors, telling jokes, and Lorca in the midst of another, drinking whiskey. Flores never learned what happened after his departure.

  Although Lorca knew little about Crane when he met him that day, in what was apparently his only encounter with the poet, he almost certainly learned something about Crane’s work afterward from Flores and from León Felipe, both of whom admired the American. Lorca came to share Crane’s disdain for urban society and his reverence for Walt Whitman, but he could not embrace Crane’s faith in the beauty and power of modern technology. Lorca was a poet of the land, not of steel girders and asphalt streets, and the longer he remained in New York, the more he understood this.

  By late August, he had begun to shape his own vision of urban America. His sense of the place evolved in part from his growing appreciation of its writers. At the time, his friend Flores was at work on one of the first Spanish translations of Eliot’s The Waste Land and frequently read portions of the poem to Lorca. Lorca thought Eliot a “terrific poet” and praised his bleak image of the modern city as a waste land peopled by squalid crowds.

  He also admired Whitman. Although Leaves of Grass had yet to be translated fully into Spanish, Lorca was familiar with the work, and during his stay in New York enjoyed long talks about the poem with León Felipe, who had come to America in large part to study Whitman. Lorca came away from these conversations with a deeply felt, if not altogether factual, grasp of Whitman’s poem. He found the work’s long lines and biblical cadences inspiring, and he was moved by Whitman’s effort to celebrate homosexual love. He sympathized with the poet’s struggle to forge a noble America. In Whitman’s day, Manhattan streets had borne the din of “carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders.” But Whitman’s nineteenth-century New York was pristine compared to the industrial behemoth Lorca confronted whenever he left his dormitory room. Like Hart Crane, Lorca mourned the loss of Whitman’s great democracy, and he came to view the American poet as a symbol of the nation’s lost innocence. He later told a group of Spanish writers that the best part of America was Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln.

  Nearly everywhere he went in New York, Lorca encountered greed, poverty, and filth. Only one place seemed free of depravity—Harlem. Much as Hart Crane viewed the Indian as the epitome of America’s flesh and soul, so Lorca came to regard the African American as the country’s “spiritual axis.”

  Late at night he often went with friends to Harlem’s jazz clubs and soft-lit cabarets, places whose names—the Cotton Club, Small’s Paradise—promised entry to another, more sensual world. Inside, Lorca would sit motionless, his head bowed, eyes lost in reverie, and listen to the sultry beat of drums and the whine of clarinets. From time to time he raised his head abruptly to murmur his approval: “What rhythm! What rhythm! How stupendous!” He learned jazz tunes and spirituals by heart and later sang them among friends, re-creating with astonishing precision the pitch and rhythm of these uniquely American forms. He compared American jazz to Spanish deep song (both had African roots, he said), and he likened the African American to the Gypsy. Each was emblematic of a primitive, carnal, vibrantly human world unfettered by puritan virtue. Each was a “persecuted” race. Blacks, like Gypsies, bared their suffering through song and dance. “Aside from black art,” Lorca would observe, “there is nothing in the United States but mechanics and automatism.”

  His perception of African Americans, like his response to the Gypsies, was both romantic and naive. Unable to fathom black culture except through music, Lorca saw what it suited him to see. He made sweeping generalizations. After briefly meeting the black author Nella Larsen, he described her as an “exquisite” woman possessed by “that deep, moving melancholy which all blacks have.” One night in Small’s Paradise, he was captivated by the sight of a black woman dancing furiously before a crowd of onlookers who shrieked with pleasure at her performance. Alone among the spectators, Lorca said later, he was able, “for a second,” to detect “her reserve, her remoteness, her inner certainty that she had nothing to do with that admiring audience of Americans and foreigners. All Harlem was like her.”

  He thought Harlem a sanctuary of art and beauty and carnality. Like many white Americans, he was drawn to the neighborhood through his zeal for the primitive, his quest for the avant-garde. Harlem in the 1920s was an African-American Paris, a gathering place for the bohemian periphery of American society, the setting for a renaissance in black arts and letters, as well as the scene of a burgeoning homosexual subculture. To Lorca, Harlem seemed an oasis of freedom, and he thrilled to it. “The most interesting thing about this city,” he told his parents late in the summer of 1929, “is this very mixture of different races and customs. I hope to study them all, and make some sense of this chaos and complexity.”

  He did not wait long. On August 5, six weeks after arriving in Manhattan, Lorca wrote what appears to have been his first New York poem, a blistering indictment of white American civilization and an exaltation of black culture. He titled the work “The King of Harlem.” His experience of New York, transitory though it was, had convinced him that beneath the passive gaze of the city’s black elevator attendants and janitors throbbed the blood-red pulse of Africa:

  Ay

  , Harlem! Ay, Harlem!

  Ay

  , Harlem!

  There is no anguish like that of your oppressed reds,

  or your blood shuddering with rage inside the dark eclipse,

  or your garnet violence, deaf and dumb in the penumbra,

  or your grand king a prisoner in the uniform of a doorman.

  Appalled by newspaper ads promoting powders to lighten black skin and pomades to flatten black hair, Lorca criticized those African Americans who would deny their race, and he rashly called for black violence to counter the cruelty of white America. One day, he wrote, black America will crush its oppressor, and blood “will flow / on rooftops everywhere, / and burn the blond women’s chlorophyll.”

  His sympathy for the American black, while patronizing, was genuine. He deplored bigotry. He had grown up in a city where racist policies had led to the destruction of a flourishing Arab, Jewish, and Christian civilization. He had witnessed cruelty against the Gypsies. But nothing in Spain approached the kind of institutionalized discrimination Lorca saw daily in the United States. Years later he told a journalist he hoped someday to write a play about the blacks, but he would remain unable to do so until he understood “a world shameless and cruel enough to divide its people by color, when color is in fact the sign of God’s artistic genius.”

  In form as well as subject matter “The King of Harlem” was a departure from Lorca’s previous work. In the poem Lorca adapted the concerns of his earlier verse—social injustice, the dichotomy between instinct and propriety—to the rhythm and tone of his new environment. He broke from the metrical forms of his past to forge long, Whitmanesque lines of free verse in which provocative urban images merge with the staccato cries of cante jondo. Referring to himself in the third person, he later said of his trip to New York that it “enriched and changed the poet’s work, since it was the first time he confronted a new world.”

  Three days after drafting “The King of Harlem,” Lorca announced confidently to his parents that he had begun to write, “and I think what I am writing is good.�
� For the first time in months, inspiration gripped him. Poems and ideas for poems crowded his mind; he had enough material, he thought, for two books: “They are typically American poems, and almost all of them deal with the blacks.” He envisioned a cycle of poems not unlike his Gypsy ballads, about the plight of African Americans in a callous white world. But this concept soon evolved into something much broader. “I am deeply interested in New York, and think I can strike a new note not only in Spanish poetry but in all that has been written about these things,” he explained to his parents. “But don’t tell anyone.”

  His sympathy for black Americans was to a large extent provoked by Lorca’s own feeling of rootlessness in white, English-speaking Manhattan. He looked to Spain with growing nostalgia. Although he maintained a cheerful guise during his first months in New York, and indeed informed his parents that he scarcely had “time to feel lonely,” he experienced periodic bouts of anguish. While visiting New York that summer, the Spanish novelist Concha Espina ran into Lorca at a dinner party and found him touched with “melancholy.” Angel del Río, who saw Lorca on a more regular basis, drew the same conclusion. From time to time, he recalled, a “shadow of absence” crossed Lorca’s dark eyes. There were constant allusions to an emotional crisis, and yet, according to del Río, Lorca never divulged its source.

  Late at night, after the rumble of traffic had died down and the summer air had cooled, Lorca often took to the streets by himself. Sometimes he strayed to the waterfront or to the Brooklyn Bridge, where he and Sofia Megwinoff occasionally strolled by day. The site entranced him as it did Hart Crane. Standing alone on the bridge, high above the East river, he could see the formidable gray silhouette of Wall Street to the south, and beyond it—a pinpoint in the inky bay—the Statue of Liberty. Behind him, to the north, the huge granite towers of midtown Manhattan rose into the night. He remained on the bridge, absorbed in his thoughts, a minuscule human figure dwarfed by the huge American metropolis. Returning uptown to Columbia in the dark hours of early morning, he sometimes picked up a pencil or a pen, and in the quiet of his room tried to record his impressions.

  As he worked to evoke the reality of New York, the brute city became imaginatively entwined with the lost paradise of his Spanish childhood. In an elegiac poem he titled “1910 (Interlude),” he looked back to a time—his twelfth year—when he had not yet beheld the cruelty of adult life:

  Those eyes of mine in nineteen-ten

  saw no one dead and buried

  no village fair of ash from the one who weeps at dawn,

  no trembling heart cornered like a sea horse.

  The squalor of urban America reinforced the purity of his boyhood memories. In the poem he recalled incidents from childhood—the time he was placed on a pony that refused to move, the day the family cat ate a frog, the portrait of Santa Rosa that hung in the maid’s bedroom, the rooftops in Granada where lovers were said to meet:

  Those eyes of mine on the pony’s neck,

  on the pierced breast of Santa Rosa as she sleeps,

  on the rooftops of love, with moans and cool hands,

  on a garden where cats devour frogs.

  In 1910, Lorca and his brother had seen Halley’s comet brighten the sky above Granada. With the same kind of fury his childhood had blazed and then evanesced, wrecked in the maelstrom of adolescent passion. Its loss was irreparable: “Don’t ask me any questions. I’ve seen how things / that seek their way find their void instead.”

  Viewed through the gray lens of Manhattan, his childhood was nothing now but a “fable of fountains,” a phrase Lorca borrowed from Jorge Guillén to use as the epigraph and refrain of another New York poem, “Your Childhood in Menton.” Begun, possibly, before Lorca even reached America, the second poem recalls a broken love affair with a man who has spurned the poet’s offer of love:

  What I gave you, Apollonian man, was the standard of love,

  fits of tears with an estranged nightingale.

  But ruin fed upon you, you whittled yourself to nothing

  for the sake of fleeting, aimless dreams.

  With its Mediterranean setting (the town of Menton is located on the French Riviera) and oblique reference to homosexual love, the poem hints at Lorca’s affairs with both Dalí and Aladrén. Poetically, at least, Lorca appeared to associate both involvements with his lost childhood, for when he first published the poem in 1932 he titled it Ribera de 1910 (shore of 1910).

  Despite the distractions of his first weeks in America, Lorca had not forgotten either man. When Ángel Flores published an article about Lorca in the magazine Alhambra, he illustrated it with a set of photographs, several of which show Lorca cavorting with Dalí in Cadaqués. In one image, Lorca sits across from the artist at a table beside the sea; the caption reads, “Writing a manifesto with the painter Dalí.” Flores suspected that Lorca gave him the photographs in order to enhance his reputation as a poet of the avant-garde. Among friends in New York, Lorca talked enthusiastically about Dali’s revolutionary work. To Flores, he confessed, “I love him. I love him.”

  Lorca’s memories of Aladrén surfaced more covertly in his poetry. In a work entitled “Fable and Round of the Three Friends,” he wrote of a man named Emilio who—like the real-life sculptor Lorca knew in Madrid—moves “in the world of eyes and wounded hands” and “the forgotten shot of gin.” In an earlier draft, Lorca included a sly reference to himself in New York, studying English “with one hundred million students who crush the anemones / … Oh, Federico!” But in a jarring sequence of images suggesting the brutal loss of identity he had experienced through Aladrén, Lorca removed himself from the final draft of the poem:

  When the pure shapes sank

  under the chirping of daisies,

  I knew they had murdered me.

  They combed the cafés, graveyards, and churches for me,

  pried open casks and cabinets,

  destroyed three skeletons in order to rip out their gold teeth.

  But they couldn’t find me anymore.

  They couldn’t?

  But they discovered the sixth moon had fled against the torrent,

  and the sea—suddenly!—remembered

  the names of all its drowned.

  After six weeks of English class, Lorca knew next to nothing of the new language. Nevertheless, he accepted an invitation to visit a tall blond American student named Philip Cummings in northern Vermont that August. Lorca had met Cummings the previous year in Madrid, and had subsequently taken the American to Granada for a brief visit. He had run into Cummings again, by chance, while traveling from Madrid to Paris earlier in the summer; Cummings had invited him to visit New England during his stay in America—and had offered to pay his train fare. Lorca told his parents the trip would constitute his “moment of truth” in English.

  But on the evening of his departure from Grand Central Station, Lorca panicked. Convinced that no one would understand him, and that he would therefore be stranded forever in the American wilderness, he shouted and gestured until one of his friends spoke to the train conductor and secured a promise to deposit him safely at his destination. Shortly after leaving New York, Lorca turned out the light in his compartment, opened the window, crawled into bed, and lay there, unable to sleep, he recalled, because “the sight of the moon and the boats on the Hudson river was so wonderful that it filled my head with ideas.” When the sun rose the following morning, he found himself surrounded by the dense green beauty of New England. At Montpelier station, Cummings and his father were waiting to greet him. Lorca threw his arms around both men and cried, “Ay! I’ve left the dungeon!”

  Cummings and his parents were spending the summer in a lakeside cottage north of Montpelier, not far from the Canadian border, in the village of Eden Mills. The name delighted Lorca. In the space of a single day, he had exchanged the gritty streets of New York for the clapboard churches and dark pines of rural Vermont. He welcomed the change, although the bucolic landscape soon made him homesick for Spain. A
t night, instead of traffic, he was lulled to sleep by the sound of wind ruffling the leaves outside the sleeping porch that he and Cummings shared. In the morning, birdsong and the peal of church bells signaled the start of another day. The two men would lie half-awake in the cool mountain air, listening.

  Philip Cummings was twenty years old in the summer of 1929, eleven years younger than Lorca. He aspired to be a poet, and during Lorca’s ten-day visit he kept a rhapsodic account of their time together in a diary he later titled “August in Eden. An Hour of Youth.” Both Cummings and his parents were tall and fair-skinned; they reminded Lorca of characters he had seen in Tom Mix cowboy movies. He was unable to communicate with either parent, except to say “Thank you” once to Cummings’s white-haired mother and to speak to her in Spanish one morning while she made doughnuts. To his parents, he described the family as a “barcarole of tenderness and bad taste.”