Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Never had Lorca so explicitly detailed his morbid preoccupation with sex, a force he knew to be at once irresistible and deadly. In one frame of Trip to the Moon, the words “HELP! HELP!” are superimposed over an image of a woman’s genitalia. In another sequence, a moon “fades into a male sex organ and then into a screaming mouth.” Throughout the script, female sexuality is a cause for fear, while male sexuality is repressed. Union between male and female is impossible—as is love itself. In the film’s closing frames, a cemetery blooms from the mouths of two lovers as they embrace, “and they are seen kissing over a tomb.” The script’s final, barren image shows a “landscape of a moon with trees swaying in the wind.”

  Trip to the Moon never made it to the screen. With his usual nonchalance, Lorca left the script with Amero and subsequently lost interest in the idea of producing a film. The medium did not suit him. “I need to be in touch with my audience,” he remarked, and went on creating plays. His brief foray into the cinema evidently quelled his need to compete with Dalí and Buñuel. It also showed him provocative new ways of probing his mind.

  His introspective existence further led Lorca to create a startling series of visual self-portraits during his stay in New York. Although he tried to dismiss these and other drawings as a simple pastime, they were in fact both a graphic companion to his American poems and a candid subtext to the cheerful letters he routinely sent home to his parents. In sketch after sketch he showed himself dwarfed by the vast American city and pursued by vile beasts. Almost invariably, his face is a featureless ovoid with blank eyes, dense black eyebrows, and a smattering of tiny crescent moons (in Spanish, lunas) in place of the moles (or lunares) that dotted his face in real life. Embryonic hands curl helplessly in the air; occasionally a cross bisects the composition.

  Most of these images contain a chimerical beast that seems emblematic of both death and sexual instinct, and whose effect on Lorca is ambiguous. Sometimes the animal claws at the poet’s face as he tries to protect himself. But in at least one self-portrait a weeping Lorca cradles the strange creature in his arms. The beast reappears in a series of large, carefully rendered color sketches. In one image the animal paws at a man’s groin; in another, he lies menacingly beside the prone body of a woman who is bleeding from her genitals.

  A year or so after leaving New York, Lorca gave one of his American self-portraits to a friend in Spain, who insisted she was unable to identify Lorca’s face in the drawing. “What do you mean?” he asked. “You don’t recognize the big eyebrows that are joined in the middle or the hair that’s parted on both sides?” His friend took another look at the sketch and this time spotted Lorca’s wide brow and crescent-shaped eyebrows. But there was little else in the demonic self-portrait to remind her of Lorca.

  With the arrival of autumn, a “beautiful light” fell on Manhattan’s streets and parks. Lorca began attending football games. The grace and virility of the sport attracted him. “Of course, I could never have been a player,” he said to his family.

  By late October his life abroad had settled into a familiar pattern. He spent part of his time reading novels and writing poems. Once a week he met with the chorus of the Spanish Institute to rehearse an upcoming program of Spanish folk music. He paid regular visits to his Spanish-speaking friends, and when Spanish celebrities such as the former bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who had played host to Lorca and his peers at the 1927 Góngora tricentennial in Seville, and the guitarist Andrés Segovia toured New York, Lorca helped welcome them. At an appearance by Sánchez Mejías, Lorca introduced the bullfighter to his New York audience as a “pure hero” of the ring who had recently dedicated himself to literature, and was creating a “valiant, poetic, and highly imaginative” art with a notably Andalusian character. Of Segovia, whom he saw on numerous occasions, Lorca told his parents, “He has taken me to the homes of a couple of millionaires I didn’t know, where I have witnessed some hilarious scenes from American life, all of which are very valuable to me.”

  Lorca now knew his way around the city. Although he occasionally got lost, he had lived in New York for five months—long enough to appreciate the “grandeur” of the place. It no longer frightened him. He hoped to stay on for at least two more months so that he could earn money on the lecture circuit. He even thought he might tour the western United States.

  But on Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange collapsed, and the city Lorca thought he understood plunged into chaos. Distraught crowds flocked to Wall Street, together with news-reel cameramen, reporters, mounted policemen, couriers, and hundreds of taxicabs. The roar of traders on the floor inside the Stock Exchange was audible a block away; a journalist compared the sound of the shouting to the cry of a dying animal. Between ten o’clock and three in the afternoon that day, eight billion dollars vanished. Spectators absorbed the news with stunned disbelief. “There were no smiles,” The New York Times reported. “There were no tears either. Just the camaraderie of fellow-sufferers.”

  At the height of the pandemonium, Lorca went to Wall Street with Angel del Río. For once, the reality of New York outstripped his imagination. “I see it,” he cried. “I understand it now.” The sight of so many desperate human beings dazed him. He spent seven hours milling around in the crowd. “I just couldn’t leave,” he told his parents. “Everywhere one looked, there were men shouting and arguing like animals and women crying. Groups of Jews were screaming and wailing on the stairways and on every corner.” People fainted, cars honked, telephones screamed. At one point Lorca encountered a friend who tearfully told him she had just lost her life savings. Lorca tried to console her.

  On his way home, he came across a suicide victim. The man had leapt to his death from the upper floors of a midtown Manhattan hotel, and as Lorca approached the scene, “they were removing the cadaver. He was a very tall, red-haired man, and all I can remember is his huge floury white hands against the gray cement street,” he reported matter-of-factly to his family. “This sight gave me a new vision of American civilization, and I found it all very logical. I don’t mean that I liked it. But I watched it all in cold blood, and I am happy I witnessed it.” Years later Lorca boasted that he had seen not one but six suicides on Black Tuesday.

  Shortly after the Crash, Lorca told his parents that the collapse of the American stock market would have no bearing on the international economy. The reality of the situation interested him far less than its metaphorical implications. The spectacle of Black Tuesday confirmed his perception of the United States as a spiritless nation controlled by “two or three bankers.” He later said he was “lucky” to have witnessed the Crash. No other event so shaped and focused his poetic concept of American civilization. Shocked by the economic crisis and the confusion it spawned, he began a new series of poems, works whose force and intensity startled his friends. By the end of 1929 he had completed at least five new poems. He was confident he would return to Spain with “two good books of poetry.” He regarded his American verse as the best he had ever written. “I think everything of mine pales alongside these latest poems, which are, so to speak, symphonic, like the noise and complexity of New York.”

  As Lorca worked on his poetry, he carried battered copies of individual poems around with him in his pockets. Whenever possible, he read them to friends. Most listeners found the impromptu recitals electrifying. “His voice would rise to a shout and then fall to a whisper, like a sea which carried you along on its tide,” Emilio Amero recalled. To Herschel Brickell, Lorca’s fiery readings showed the degree to which America had “troubled his soul.”

  Eventually, what Lorca thought would be two books of American poems became a single collection entitled Poet in New York. Although the book remained unpublished until 1940, he devoted considerable time and energy to it in the 1930s, organizing and reorganizing its components and envisioning the collection in a number of different permutations. To audiences who heard him recite parts of the work in America and later in Spain, Lorca revealed
a new self, a poet whose bitter account of urban America recalls “The moon! The police. The foghorns of the ocean liners! / Facades of rust, of smoke, anemones, rubber gloves.”

  In choosing the city as the essential theme and setting of his poems, he was knowingly heeding the example of Baudelaire, Poe, Eliot, Crane, and even his own compatriot Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose impressionistic 1917 evocation of New York City, Diary of a Newly Wed Poet, recounts the author’s response to such sights as Broadway and the Manhattan skyline. But Lorca’s take on American life is far more profound. He later spoke of his New York poems as representing an encounter between two poetic worlds—his own and New York’s. He had no interest in writing a conventional narrative of his trip to America. “What I will give is my lyrical reaction,” he said. His perspective was not that of a tourist but of a “man who looks up at the great mechanical workings of the elevated train and feels the sparks of burning coal fall into his eyes.” He approached the task with the fury Ruben Darío had displayed in his 1903 diatribe against the United States, “To Roosevelt,” a poem Lorca clearly had in mind as he labored over his New York collection, especially his odes.

  In a departure from his previous work, Lorca wrote nearly all of his New York poetry in free verse. The poems’ dense, at times hallucinatory imagery led many critics to suggest that with this collection he was trying to imitate Rafael Alberti’s most recent book, Upon the Angels, an avant-garde work that differed markedly from Alberti’s earlier, neopopular verse. Although Lorca refused to acknowledge any debt to Alberti, he was in all likelihood influenced by Upon the Angels, which appeared in Spain a few months before his departure for New York and sparked considerable interest among the country’s literary elite. Poet in New York shares with Alberti’s collection a certain dreamlike quality that justifiably prompted many readers to label both works surrealist.

  But although influenced by surrealism, Lorca’s New York poems owe more to Góngoran metaphor and cubist techniques of collage than to Breton’s radical ethos. Lorca was not one to subscribe to movements—especially one so dogmatic as surrealism. His American poems are their own creation. Each, he said, is a self-sufficient entity, an “escape” from reality, a poetic hecho or “event.” While at times impenetrable, even to him, these poetic “events,” Lorca explained, “respond to an exclusively poetic logic and follow the dense constructs of human emotion and the poem’s architecture.”

  In the collection’s best poems fact blends with fiction, and language with emotion, to yield both a public indictment of urban society and a private cry of despair. With his American poems, Lorca returned for the first time in nearly ten years to a first-person, confessional voice. The solitude of his experience abroad, coupled with his linguistic isolation, had forced him to look inward: “I, poet without arms, lost / in the vomiting multitude.” The aloof, dispassionate voice of Songs, Poem of the Deep Song, and Gypsy Ballads no longer sufficed. If he was to decry an inhuman world, Lorca must acknowledge his own humanity. And yet, though grounded in reality, the embittered “I” of his New York poems is just as much an invention as the carefree “I” of the letters Lorca sent to his family from America.

  His sense of rootlessness in New York fueled a poetic vision of an alien metropolis where life has no value: “What matters is this: emptied space. Lonely world. / River’s mouth.” Love exists merely in brief, unhappy encounters—often with sailors. Death is everywhere. (For a time, Lorca considered titling the collection Introduction to Death.) In a civilization numbed by cruelty, only pain “keeps everything awake.” There is no possibility of redemption in Lorca’s city, “only a crowd of laments / unbuttoning their clothes, waiting for the bullets.”

  Stripped of faith by his confrontation with America, robbed of identity, the protagonist of Poet in New York alludes no fewer than nine times to his own murder. Not since his earliest work—Impressions and Landscapes and his juvenilia—had Lorca painted so dire a portrait of the human race. Nor had he railed so furiously against the Catholic Church. In the Whitmanesque “Cry to Rome (From the Tower of the Chrysler Building),” a poem originally called “Ode to Injustice,” Lorca scorns the Church—“the great dome / that military tongues anoint with oil”—and denounces its leader:

  But the man dressed in white

  knows nothing of the mystery of the wheat ear,

  or the moans of a woman giving birth,

  or the fact that Christ can still give water …

  At the center of this punishing world is the innocent child Lorca yearned both to be and to engender. Lost, abandoned, drowned—the image of the child recurs throughout the collection, a symbol of purity in a corrupt adult world. In an early draft of one poem, “Abandoned Church (Ballad of the Great War),” Lorca recalled the child he had literally helped to bury when he was four years old, his baby brother Luis, dead at the age of twenty months from some childhood malady and here transformed into the poet’s son, a victim of World War I, “lost in the arches, one Friday, Day of the Dead.”

  From the start of his American odyssey, Lorca had seized on childhood as a primary motif of his journey. The five-year-old Hungarian boy whom he had met while crossing the Atlantic—the “rose of Hungary who disappears into the belly of New York, seeking his fortune”—foreshadowed Lorca’s own overseas quest, both real and metaphorical, for the self he had once been. Away from Spain, he wrestled not only with the loss of his boyhood innocence but with the implied sterility of his existence as a homosexual. In a sonnet entitled “Adam”—a poem Lorca wrote in Manhattan but ultimately chose to exclude from Poet in New York—he postulates the viability of two types of offspring: the blood-red, mortal child of flesh and veins, and the imagined, eternal child of art. The first is the product of a heterosexual “Adam” who “dreams in the fever of the clay / of a child who comes galloping / through the double pulse of his cheek.” The second, and implicitly superior, child is the creation of a “dark, other Adam” who dreams “a neuter moon of seedless stone / where the child of light will burn.”

  Gradually, Lorca was coming to terms with the idea of himself as an “other Adam.” Freed from the influence of family life and from the constraints of Spanish society, he became more outspoken in the United States, more willing to reveal himself through his work. It was, above all, the example of Whitman that showed him how to proceed. From conversations with his friend León Felipe, Lorca learned of Whitman’s love for “comrades” and of his attempt to articulate that love in Leaves of Grass. Whitman complained that his “insolent poems” did not reflect the “real Me [who] still stands / untouched, untold, altogether unreached” But to Lorca, the American succeeded in forging a poetic language through which to convey the beauty of love between men. He grew to idolize Whitman, and in one of the longest, most explicit poems of his New York cycle, the “Ode to Walt Whitman,” he voiced his admiration:

  Enemy of the satyr,

  enemy of the vine,

  and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth …

  Begun in Manhattan and completed some three months after he left New York, Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” expands on themes he had addressed more tentatively in such poems as “Song of the Little Pansy,” his ode to Sesostris, and “Two Norms.” The poem frankly confronts the issue of homosexual love, positing Whitman himself as an exemplar of such passion at its most sublime:

  … virile beauty,

  who among mountains of coal, billboards, and railroads,

  dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping like a river

  with that comrade who would place in your breast

  the small ache of an ignorant leopard.

  But Whitman’s dream is sullied by the “gray rats” of twentieth-century America, by the “machinery and lament” of urban New York, and most of all by the “faggots of the world, murderers of doves,” who point their “stained fingers” at Whitman and cry, “He’s one, too! That’s right!”

  Against the corrupt love of the “faggot” who flaunts his “tumescen
t flesh and unclean thoughts” in bordellos and bars, Lorca pits the virile example of Whitman, whose passion for his own sex is both honorable and good. Lorca hated the effeminate homosexual—perhaps because feared such traits in himself. Speaking in general of this type of man, he once said, “He amuses me with his womanish urge to wash, to iron and sew, to put on makeup, to wear skirts, to speak with effeminate gestures and movements. But I don’t like it.” Whitman allowed Lorca to suggest another ideal: “Adam of blood, Macho, / man alone at sea, Walt Whitman, lovely old man.” If homosexual passion does not lead to the procreation of children, so be it; in a world where life is rounded by death, all types of love are noble:

  Man is able, if he wishes, to guide his desire

  through a vein of coral or a nude as blue as the sky.

  Tomorrow, loves will become stones, and Time

  a breeze that drowses in the branches.

  On December 7, Lorca’s sister Concha married Manuel Montesinos in Granada. From New York, Lorca wrote to say that he hoped the newlyweds would not wait long to start a family, “since Paco and I are such drones and haven’t married and had children.”

  He was determined to remain in the United States until his lecture tour materialized and he earned some money from it. The Christmas season arrived, and with it the odd spectacle of pine trees in storefronts, private homes, and even Times Square. Privately, Lorca thought the holiday simply an excuse for American Christians to flaunt their “scorn for the Jews … who bear the brunt of business.” But he enjoyed the festivities. He spent Christmas Eve with friends at the Brickells’ lavish apartment. At midnight the group attended Mass at Saint Paul the Apostle Catholic Church. “What a beautiful Mass!” Lorca cried afterward. Later, over hotcakes and maple syrup at a Childs restaurant, he regaled his friends with stories of Christmas in Spain. In a subsequent letter home he commented on the high incidence of alcohol poisoning in New York City on Christmas Day; as usual, he inflated the facts to make his point.