Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  On September 17, Xirgu opened her season’s second offering, Yerma; for a time the play ran in repertory with La dama boba. Immediately prior to the opening of Yerma the Catalan press questioned the work’s morality. Lorca conceded that his play might be censored. “And if it is, then clearly I’m responsible,” he said, and smiled. Curiosity about the work reached such heights that on opening night the theater became “dangerously” crowded. Shouts erupted in ticket lines outside the box office as people forced their way into the building. Eventually the police intervened. Lorca looked on with satisfaction. “This is the way it should be,” he said. “People should be passionate about the theater. It’s good to see them fighting and arguing like this, as though they were at a rugby match.”

  That evening he and Xirgu were called onstage repeatedly to accept the crowd’s applause. At the final curtain, Lorca acknowledged his debt, both to Barcelona—where in 1927, with Mariana Pineda, he had experienced his “baptism of blood in the theater”—and to Xirgu. “I give all this applause to Margarita Xirgu,” he said. Reviews of the production were mixed. Although some critics hailed Yerma as a “song to motherhood,” a “profound monologue by a wounded woman who shrieks her pain,” others predictably attacked the play’s “crudeness, degeneration, and sensuality.” The controversy heightened public interest in the work. During its five-week run in Barcelona Lorca was called onstage nightly. “We authors must pay tribute to success, must go out to ‘bathe in the waves’ of applause,” he said. Wherever he went people surrounded him. Strangers gave him gifts. Two separate literary journals held homages in his honor. Journalists demanded interviews; local organizations requested poetry readings. Lorca relished the attention and sought to inflate his fame. He told La Humanitat that his Gypsy Ballads, now in its sixth edition, had sold “more than sixty thousand copies”—a modest exaggeration. When the Catalan art critic Sebastian Gasch, who had known Lorca since 1927, met with him in Barcelona that fall, he found Lorca so preoccupied with his own fame that Gasch refused to do more than exchange a few “trivial words” with him.

  “Yerma’s success in Barcelona is unique,” Lorca wrote to his parents, still eager for their approval. “I can’t recall such enthusiasm, not even in Buenos Aires. The theater is jammed, and tickets cost 6 pesetas, an unheard-of price these days.” His mother congratulated him on his success and reminded him “to be careful and not throw your money away foolishly. Save what you can for yourself, because financial success isn’t always certain.”

  On October 6 Lorca gave a public reading to commemorate the first anniversary of the Asturian revolution. Sponsored by the Barcelona Atheneum and held in a crowded theater, the event was broadcast over radio and aimed specifically at the “workers” of Catalunya. Lorca sat onstage for the reading, behind a table with a huge Radio Barcelona microphone. He wore a light-colored suit with a dark bow tie. Xirgu sat beside him, dressed in a floor-length gown in shades of white, pale yellow, and pink.

  The moment Lorca began to speak, the packed auditorium fell silent. He read two of his more stridently antiauthoritarian works, the “The King of Harlem” and the “Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard.” “Oh city of the gypsies! / Corners hung with banners. / Put your green lights out: / the Civil Guard is coming,” he intoned. “… They are riding two abreast / to the celebrating city. / The murmur of everlastings / invades their cartridge belts.” The poem’s graphic indictment of the country’s rural police force sparked sympathetic murmurs in the audience. When he finished, the crowd jumped up and shouted, “Long live the poet of the people!”

  Afterward, fans stood in line for more than an hour and a half to shake Lorca’s hand. He was so moved he felt a lump in his throat and could scarcely speak. For years he had felt estranged from the working classes who had been his neighbors and friends in childhood, but whose lives differed so dramatically from the bourgeois existence he had come to enjoy as a “rich man’s son.” The recital restored him to his roots. He told his parents, “It seemed so true, this contact with the real people.”

  He marveled at those who had come to hear him: “artisans, old workers, mechanics, children, students. It was the loveliest act I have experienced in my life.” The event was bound to provoke his opponents, but he didn’t care. In a nation so torn by political, religious, and social discord as Spain was in 1935, no public figure could escape accusations of partisanship. Besides, Lorca was proud of his liberal ideals. “No doubt the Right will seize upon all this in its campaign against Margarita and me, but it doesn’t matter,” he said to his parents. “It is almost better that way—the way we stand will be out in the open once and for all. Anyway, in Spain it is no longer possible to be neutral.”

  Earlier in the week, he had insisted that mere popularity did not interest him. “It’s too frivolous.” The most beautiful thing a poet could hope to achieve was “to enter into the soul of the people—this is poetry!” When asked to define the role he thought poets should play in the struggle for social justice, he replied that poets cannot remain impassive; they must absorb and understand the “frightening tragedy of the oppressed,” must do everything in their power to fight “for a more just, more humane world.” He spoke briefly about war, calling it “monstrous, criminal.” He found it incomprehensible that after the “bitter proof” of World War I, people still believed in fighting. “It is a disgrace for our civilization.”

  Lorca’s reading to commemorate the Asturian revolt coincided with news of the Italian army’s invasion of the independent African empire of Abyssinia, the first step by Mussolini toward creating a “new Roman empire” to free Italy from the “prison of the Mediterranean.” Headlines in Barcelona announced the “Advance of Fascist Troops on Ethiopia.” Subsequent reports told of futile efforts by the League of Nations to check the dictator’s aggression. Two months earlier, the government of Italy had invited Lorca and Xirgu to participate in a tricentennial homage to Lope de Vega. Xirgu had accepted and planned to visit Italy that fall on a four-city tour of the country; while there she intended to present Yerma and to star in a new production of Lorca’s adaptation of La dama boba, directed by the 1934 Nobel laureate, Luigi Pirandello. But because of the Abyssinian invasion, the actress canceled her Italian tour and announced that she would extend her company’s season in Barcelona to include a new production of Blood Wedding.

  Lorca condemned what he described as the “tyranny” of the fascist regimes in Italy as well as Germany, and declared his solidarity with artists in both countries. In early November he signed an open letter calling for an end to the fighting in Ethiopia. Other signatories included Antonio Machado and Fernando de los Ríos. “Spaniards!” the letter began. “To put your moral weight behind Abyssinia today is to defend our own future, which must not be linked to anything but reason, law, and peace.” The document appeared in newspapers throughout Spain; in Madrid, Gracia y Justicia ridiculed both Lorca and Machado for having signed the letter. Meanwhile, Lorca announced his desire to write a “work of peace,” a play entitled Soldiers Who Don’t Want to Go to War, in which various women—mothers, sisters, daughters, girlfriends, wives—decry the governments who instigate war.

  Within weeks of the cancelation of her Italian tour, the citizens of Barcelona staged a tribute in Xirgu’s honor. Proceeds from the event were to benefit Spain’s political prisoners. Approximately eight thousand people crowded into Barcelona’s Olympia Theater to render homage to the handsome actress, then forty-seven, whose political courage and artistic daring were to her fans a source of both pride and inspiration. Former prime minister Manuel Azaña sent his regards, as did the cellist Pablo Casals. Bouquets of flowers, many bearing the symbol of Catalunya, a region long known for its liberal politics, showered the actress at the end of the evening. As he watched the colorful spectacle, Lorca applauded the spirited Catalan audience. “What a people!” he cried.

  In the midst of Yerma’s five-week Barcelona run, Ana María Dalí came to Barcelona to see Lorca. It was the first tim
e in nearly a decade they had met. Then twenty-seven, the painter’s sister was more beautiful than ever, with limpid brown eyes and a beatific smile. She found Lorca at the theater, and the two went off to a café. They talked at length about Ana Maria’s brother, who had recently returned to Cadaqués with his wife, Gala Eluard, after being expelled by the French surrealists for “counterrevolutionary activities,” which included outspoken praise of Hitler and fascism. Although Lorca had not seen Dalí since 1928, neither man had forgotten the other. In 1930, Lorca had written to Dalí to suggest that they go to New York and Moscow together. In 1934, Dalí had invited Lorca to visit him in Cadaqués. “If you came we could understand each other better now about many things. Gala is terribly curious to meet you.” The artist had proposed that he and Lorca collaborate on an opera. He signed his letter “your Budo” a probable reference to Buda, or “Buddha.”

  Soon after his visit with Ana María, Lorca saw Dalí for the first time in seven years. On the day of their reunion, September 28, Lorca had been expected to attend a concert in his honor. When he failed to appear, his absence sparked a crisis until someone discovered his whereabouts and announced to the gathering that the playwright had gone off to the nearby town of Tarragona with the celebrated Catalan artist Salvador Dalí. A local newspaper observed wryly that while Lorca “may hold the record for receiving the most invitations, he also holds the record for not attending parties to which he’s been invited.”

  Lorca and Dalí saw each other frequently that fall. Lorca seized every occasion to demonstrate his affection for his old friend. During a recital at a Barcelona bookstore, he read his 1926 “Ode to Salvador Dalí,” a work not ordinarily part of his repertoire. Asked his thoughts on contemporary Catalan art, he said, “For me, Dalí is the purest of all contemporary painters.” On the subject of his own work—specifically, whether the characters in his plays were “real or symbolic”—he said in an interview that while each of his characters was real, each also embodied a symbol. “They’re an aesthetic reality. That’s why Salvador Dalí and the surrealists like them so much.”

  Dalí praised the “extremely dark and surrealist ideas” that filled Lorca’s Yerma. He proposed that they “do things together again,” and the two made plans to collaborate on a project that both would write and design. “We’re twin spirits,” Lorca told a reporter, overlooking Dalí’s right-wing political views. “Here’s the proof: seven years without seeing each other, and we agree on everything as if we’d been talking daily. Genius, genius: Salvador Dalí.” But the project never transpired, and after a few months their friendship again slackened. Dalí was preoccupied with his wife and with his growing international fame, Lorca with his new work and the demands of a high-profile theater career. Neither could turn back the clock.

  Yerma ended its Barcelona run on October 20. Five days later Xirgu presented the play in Tarragona; the following day she and her company traveled south to Valencia to open a three-week run featuring performances of Lorca’s Yerma, Lope de Vega’s La dama boba and Fuenteovejuna, and Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio. Lorca arrived in Valencia on November 9 after a hurried trip home to Madrid, where he gave a poetry reading to a group of schoolchildren. He traveled to Valencia from Madrid by plane. He had been fascinated by air travel ever since Lindbergh’s celebrated Atlantic crossing. He talked of the “fragility” and “uncertainty” of the airplane’s wings, and described the pilot’s art as that of being “suspended between two abysses, face-to-face with death.”

  Critics in Valencia raved about Yerma, and audiences praised the work. Lorca told El Mercantil Valenciano that only two types of problems were currently of interest in art: “social and sexual. Works that don’t address one of these are destined to fail, even when they’re good. I choose to deal with the sexual, because it appeals to me more.” In Valencia, as in Barcelona, politics colored audience attitudes toward Yerma. On the play’s closing night, a wildly enthusiastic crowd filled the theater, and Xirgu received floral bouquets from two local republican associations. The previous day, young Valencian republicans had staged a huge outdoor protest against fascism and war. A speaker at the event warned the crowd that Spain had reached a political turning point, and citizens must “influence the historic destiny of our country.”

  Lorca refrained from political activity in Valencia. During his brief stay in the city he responded dutifully to reporters’ questions about his work, and he obliged local theatergoers by going onstage during performances of Yerma to accept their accolades. But to friends and colleagues he seemed distracted. His sometime secretary and close companion, Rafael Rodriguez Rapún, had promised to visit him in Valencia. On the appointed day Lorca went to the train station to meet him. But although he waited impatiently for Rapún to arrive, the handsome engineering student, then twenty-three, never showed up. The two men did not see each other until a week or so later, when Rapún traveled to Barcelona. Their friendship of nearly three years had become an increasing source of distress to Lorca; among trusted friends, he complained of Rapún’s growing need to engage in heterosexual liaisons.

  While in Valencia, or shortly afterward, Lorca drafted a series of sonnets chronicling a love affair between two unnamed persons. He worked impulsively, scribbling the poems on stationery from Valencia’s Hotel Victoria. The sonnets range in subject from the mundane (“The Poet Speaks with His Beloved on the Telephone”; “The Poet Asks His Love to Write Him”) to the exalted (“Sonnet of the Rose Garland”; “Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint”). Collectively the poems speak of a troubled, at times cruel relationship between two partners, one of whom—the first-person “Poet”—is more blindly devoted than the other, and consequently suffers more.

  In writing the sonnets Lorca was careful not to disclose the gender of his protagonists, a considerable feat given the gender-specific nature of the Spanish language. But in one poem, “Love Sleeps in the Poet’s Breast,” the narrator uses a masculine past participle to describe his beloved, thus indicating that their affair is homosexual. In an earlier draft of another sonnet, Lorca was even more candid. He titled the poem “Soneto gongorino en que Federico manda a su amigo una paloma”: “Sonnet in the Manner of Góngora in Which Federico Sends His [Male] Friend a Dove.” Ultimately, Lorca rejected the title in favor of the more oblique “Sonnet in the Manner of Góngora in Which the Poet Sends His Beloved a Dove.”

  To the poet Vicente Aleixandre, Lorca later referred to the cycle as “Sonnets of Dark Love.” In public, however, he spoke only of his “sonnets” or “book of sonnets.” Aleixandre believed that to Lorca “dark love” meant simply “the love of difficult passion … of dark and painful, unrequited, or badly experienced passion.” It did not specifically mean homosexual love, but rather “love without destination, without a future.” After hearing the eleven poems for the first time, Aleixandre turned to Lorca and exclaimed, “How much you’ve had to love, how much you’ve had to suffer!” Lorca gazed at his friend and smiled.

  His decision to undertake the series in late 1935 sprang in part from a chance encounter in Valencia with the poet Juan Gil-Albert, who was about to publish his own first sonnet collection, Mysterious Presence, a series of poems openly addressed to another male. Gil-Albert read passages of the book to Lorca, who was both moved by the collection and challenged by its existence to attempt a similar sequence. Gil-Albert also gave Lorca a curious gift during his visit to Valencia, a live dove in a cage. The gesture subsequently formed the anecdotal basis for Lorca’s “Sonnet in the Manner of Góngora in Which the Poet Sends His Beloved a Dove.”

  By 1935, love poetry had again become fashionable in Spain, as the impersonal, dehumanized verse of the mid-19 20s gave way to a “new romanticism,” a “rehumanization” of literature, prompted to some degree by a greater concern for politics and the pressing realities of contemporary Spanish life. Classical forms were also newly in vogue. In 1933, Lorca’s friend Pedro Salinas had published La voz a ti debida (My Voice Because of You), a collection of love p
oems whose title, recalls the second eclogue of the Golden Age poet Garcilaso. Younger writers such as Miguel Hernández, Germán Bleiberg, and the Granadan poet Luis Rosales were likewise writing love poems and experimenting with classical forms. Lorca spoke of their efforts as a “crusade,” and characterized his own sonnet cycle as a similar “return to prescribed forms after a wide-ranging and sunny stroll through the freedom of meter and rhyme.”

  For years he had admired the sonnet’s “apparently cold” form, its ability to preserve “an eternal feeling,” and he sought to master its stringent requirements. “You can’t be a poet until you make sonnets,” he said. “You must dominate the sonnet, and not allow it to dominate you.” In his periodic attempts at the form, he had followed Golden Age convention by linking the sonnet with such topics as death, love, and the enduring nature of art. He aspired to a command of the genre as powerful as Shakespeare’s. “One hundred sonnets … just like the ones Shakespeare wrote!” he remarked to a friend in 1935. He believed that Shakespeare’s sonnets “could not have been written except by a man who had homosexual tendencies.” He also admired Whitman’s twelve-sonnet series dramatizing a homosexual attachment.

  He confessed to a friend in the summer of 1935 that he had “never stopped being a romantic poet,” despite the decadelong popularity of cerebral, “pure” verse. In the early 1930s he had talked of issuing a book of love poems written in “waltz time”: Because I Love Only You (Tanda of Waltzes); he wrote two intensely personal “waltz” poems before setting aside the series to focus on The Divan at Tamarit, a collection preoccupied with love, although always in the context of death. His sonnets of dark love are a further product of a romantic imagination. They describe a flawed but vital love affair, one so necessary that all aspects of it, even suffering, are to be cherished. The author of the sonnets speaks of his beloved in Christ-like terms as “my hidden treasure … my cross, my dampened pain”; he refers to himself as “a dog, and you alone my master.” A gulf of misunderstanding separates the two protagonists of the series, even at their most intimate: