Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  The young group launched a vigorous campaign to reform and revitalize Granada. They organized homages to overlooked artists from the city’s past. They talked of founding an avant-garde magazine, and openly scorned much of what passed for art in Granada. Despite his association with the institution, Lorca joined his Rinconcillo peers in attacking the Granada Arts Center, which the group perceived as a symbol of bourgeois pretension. Eventually, Lorca and two others from the Rinconcillo officially resigned from the Arts Center in protest against its provincial artistic “direction.”

  Increasingly, he saw himself as a visionary waging a noble fight for artistic purity. Thanks to his friends in the Rinconcillo, who praised his expertise on the piano, he also viewed himself as a serious musician and composer with a budding future. But at the university he continued to flounder. Except for one or two sympathetic teachers, no one on the faculty paid much attention to him. At home, he drifted further away from his parents. Matters came to a head each spring when he invariably failed one of his university exams, and his father was forced to postpone the family’s annual seaside vacation in Málaga so that Federico could stay home and study.

  In 1915, at the age of seventeen, Lorca took an art history course from Martín Domínguez Berrueta, a charismatic professor in his mid-forties whose passion for his subject caught Federico by surprise and prompted him to reassess his attitude toward school. Lorca quickly fell under the man’s spell. Like de los Ríos, Berrueta was one of a very few university professors who sought to breach the divide between faculty and students. He cultivated friendships with his pupils, invited them home to meet his wife and children, and took select groups of them on exhaustive trips through Spain. Devoted to art, he spoke enthusiastically to his classes about aesthetics. Lorca found him deeply inspiring. The two shared a romantic temperament and a sentimental view of the artist as a melancholy soul. Both loved Granada. Don Martin routinely took his students on outings to city monuments—a novel concept in Spanish education. At the same time, he recognized Granada’s shortcomings, and in words familiar to Federico from the Rinconcillo, he decried Granada’s “lazy atmosphere.”

  A small, headstrong man with a spare frame and a long, angular face, Berrueta was the author of more than half a dozen books, among them Mysticism in Poetry and The Religious Problem from Within. Obsessed with his mission as a teacher, he concerned himself with all aspects of his students’ lives, including their love affairs. To those who challenged his ideas, he reacted furiously, his pointed gray beard flapping with indignation. His detractors thought him pompous and meddlesome. José Mora Guarnido despised Berrueta’s “cheap histrionics and vanity,” and tried to steer Lorca away from him. But Lorca dismissed his friend’s warnings.

  Twice yearly, in the hope that select students could experience life beyond the confines of provincial Granada and could “know and love Spain,” Berrueta organized sightseeing expeditions to different regions of the country. The professor chose his travelers carefully, seeking those—such as Lorca—who were artistically or intellectually inclined, or who, as Mora Guarnido cynically concluded, were both skilled and docile enough to mimic Don Martin’s aesthetic theories. In June 1916, one week after his eighteenth birthday, Lorca set out on the first of four expeditions he would make with Berrueta. His father paid his travel costs. The excursions permanently altered Lorca’s perception of himself. “For the first time,” he remembered years later, “I became fully aware of myself as a Spaniard.”

  He was one of six young men to accompany Berrueta on a week-long journey through Andalusia that June. The group traveled north by train to the hill towns of Baeza and Úbeda, then west to Córdoba, and south to Ronda before returning home. Every day they set out before dawn for an arduous morning’s tour of local monuments. In the evenings, Berrueta, and occasionally his students, gave lectures and informal talks to local hosts and dignitaries. Lorca sometimes played the piano.

  Each student was expected to keep detailed notes on everything he saw and heard. Lorca applied himself to the task with unaccustomed zeal. On pages crowded with misspelled words and meandering lines, he logged his daily activities, noted the history of ancient sites, and traced the ancestry of Spanish kings and queens. He wrote exuberantly, his ear tuned to the melody and rhythm of words as if to music. In Baeza he observed rapturously, “Here among these golden stones, one is always drunk on romanticism.” He described the town’s cathedral as a “solemn black chord.” Upon his return to Granada the following week, he read some of his notes to the Rinconcillo. His friends were startled by Federico’s observant eye and unexpectedly graceful style.

  He had until then remained intent on a career in music, and in recent weeks had become more than ever convinced of his calling. Shortly before his trip through Andalusia with Professor Berrueta, his beloved piano teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa, had died. Wishing to consecrate his life to his teacher’s memory, Lorca had promptly asked his father to send him to Paris to study the piano. The landowner had refused. Dismayed, Lorca now turned impulsively toward a new vocation—one that would not require his father’s financial endorsement. He later described this period in a brief, dispassionate autobiographical note: “Since his parents did not permit him to move to Paris in order to continue his initial studies, and his music teacher had died, García Lorca turned his (dramatic) pathetic creative zeal towards poetry.” He never wholly reconciled himself to the choice. As an adult he once remarked, “Never in poetry will I be able to say as much as I would have said in music.”

  Berrueta became his new idol. The art history professor taught Lorca to write and introduced him to writers. During their visit to Baeza in the summer of 1916, Lorca met the poet Antonio Machado. Then forty-one, Machado was known throughout Spain for The Castilian Country, a collection of poems drawn from the poet’s extended residence in central Spain. Published to wide acclaim in 1912, The Castilian Country revealed Machado’s preoccupations with time, death, and the spiritual calm of childhood—issues that had begun to absorb Lorca.

  As a member of Berrueta’s ensemble, Lorca received a warm welcome from Machado. Whenever the art history professor visited Baeza, he and Machado engaged in long conversations and joint poetry recitals. During their brief visit in 1916, Lorca and his fellow students heard Machado read a selection of his verse as well as several poems by Rubén Darío. Following the reading, Lorca gave a short piano recital. His encounter with Machado so enthralled him that on returning to Granada he reenacted the episode for his parents, gravely imitating the poet’s measured voice.

  Machado exemplified Lorca’s idea of a writer. A sad, reclusive man whose shabby black suit habitually bore traces of cigarette ash on its lapels, Machado had quietly observed the desolate landscapes of Castile and memorialized them in his poems. Born in Andalusia but educated at the Free Teaching Institution in Madrid, he had spent several years as a teacher in the small Castilian town of Soria. While there he married a beautiful woman in her teens. Their brief, blissful union ended in 1913 with his young wife’s sudden death. Near mad with grief, Machado fled south to the isolated town of Baeza, where he took a job teaching secondary-school French and wrote mournful poems steeped in the Andalusian landscape. Neighbors grew accustomed to the sight of him roaming the streets alone like a vagrant. Sometimes Machado wandered fifteen miles of twisting road to the nearby town of Úbeda for a cup of coffee, then returned, on foot, to Baeza.

  He described his poetry as a “borderline song,” on the other side of which lay death. He resisted both artistic and intellectual fads, calmly drafting a body of work whose almost casual tempo and tone yield brief, surprising epiphanies. He was influenced by Hispanic modernismo but withstood its decadent excesses; he shunned free verse and avant-garde poetics. His work is marked by an acute consciousness of landscape and time, a subtle irony, and a receptiveness to both folklore and traditional verse and song—the latter a trait Machado acquired from his father, who collected popular Spanish folksongs and lore.

 
One of the most celebrated writers of his time, Machado spoke modestly of the poet as “a poor creature in a dream / groping for God perpetually in the mist.” He viewed poetry as “neither hard and timeless marble, / nor painting nor music, / but the word in time.” Through verse he aimed to effect a “deep pulsing of spirit.” His Castilian Country offers a harsh critique of provincial Spanish life and a bleak assessment of the country’s state of mind and role in history. Machado never fully resolved his ambivalence toward Spain.

  By example, he taught Lorca to regard poetry as a melancholy medium and to view the poet’s mission as a solitary one. When a new edition of Machado’s Complete Poems appeared in 1917, Lorca borrowed a copy from a friend. Smitten by the collection, he drafted a seventy-nine-line poem that began, “In this book I would set down / my entire soul.” With a purple pencil he copied the poem out in its entirety on the title page of his friend’s book and signed his name at the bottom. The work conveys his understanding of the writer’s task:

  The poet is the medium

  of Nature

  who explains her grandeur

  by means of words.

  The poet comprehends

  all that is incomprehensible,

  and it is he who calls things

  that despise each other, friends.

  He knows that every path

  is impossible, and thus

  he walks them calmly

  in the night.

  Poetry “is the impossible / made possible,” Lorca wrote. Not unlike music, it is the visible record of invisible desire, the mystery of the spirit made flesh, a mournful relic of what the artist once loved. “Poetry is the life / we traverse in anguish / awaiting the one who leads / our boat adrift.”

  Lorca made his second trip with Professor Berrueta in October 1916. This time the group traveled to northern Spain—to Machado’s Castile, and from there to Galicia. The excursion lasted twenty-one days and included stops in Madrid, Avila, Burgos, and Berrueta’s hometown of Salamanca.

  Like Machado, Lorca was transfixed by Castile, and in his journal described the region’s windswept fields as “all red, all kneaded with the blood of Abel and Cain.” Its towns were “full of melancholy charms, memories of tragic loves.” Throughout the trip Lorca kept a record of his impressions in which he blended fact with emotional fancy. He sprinkled his prose with musical terms. Of his arrival in Avila he wrote, “There were few stars in the sky, and the wind was slowly glossing the infinite melody of the night.”

  In Avila, the group traced the route of Saint Teresa and received special permission to tour the cloistered convent where the sixteenth-century mystic had lived and worked. A veiled nun led them through the building, sounding a bell in order to warn the other sisters of the group’s approach. Lorca could scarcely subdue his curiosity. In a letter to his parents he explained that he and his friends “took photographs of the nuns on the sly (they didn’t want us to). It was a real coup.” In the midst of the tour, Professor Berrueta told Federico to cut tiny splinters from “everything the Saint used,” so that he could take souvenirs of Teresa home with him to Granada.

  That evening, Berrueta gave a lecture on art at a local school and arranged for a few of his students to do the same. Luis Mariscal, a plump teenager known for his academic prowess, spoke on “artistic cities.” Lorca talked briefly about Andalusian music, then played the piano. The next day El Diario de Avila praised the “young musician,” suggesting that his piano composition “Albaicín” proved him a worthy heir to Isaac Albéniz. Someone copied the long article by hand onto six separate sheets of paper and mailed the account home to Lorca’s parents.

  He received similar notices in both Santiago de Compostela and Burgos, where the weather was so cold that his face and lips became chapped. “But I’m stronger and more agile, and I must have gained two or three kilos, so clearly this suits me,” he assured his parents. Throughout the three-week journey he sent letters and telegrams to his family and telephoned them at prearranged times. He repeatedly asked his father to wire him more money. From Ávila he complained that his funds were “dwindling” because he was spending money on souvenirs; in Burgos the story was the same.

  “I’m in Salamanca extremely happy this is beautiful I’m visiting monuments,” he informed his family by telegram soon after reaching the ancient university town where Professor Berrueta had been born and later taught. Lorca basked in his teacher’s attentions and strove hard to please him. Berrueta is more like “an eighteen-year-old boy” than a middle-aged man, he told his parents. “He runs, he laughs, he sings with us, and he treats us as equals … I am delighted.” In Salamanca, the professor took his students on a silent tour of the city and introduced them to his friend and former colleague Miguel de Unamuno, professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Salamanca and its former rector. An essayist, poet, novelist, playwright, and philosopher of international renown, Unamuno, at fifty-two, was the leading member of the Generation of ’98 and one of the most brilliant men of his time. His square face, aquiline nose, and round, wire-rimmed spectacles gave him the appearance of a vigilant owl. Antonio Machado referred to him as the rector “not only of Salamanca” but of Spain itself.

  Although he left no record of his meeting with Unamuno in 1916, within two years of the encounter Lorca eagerly recommended the professor’s work to friends. He underlined a number of passages in his copy of Unamuno’s Essays, and inside the book wrote:

  At the crossroads of blurred death

  I will be quiet and sweet,

  singing my song.

  And my intense bitterness

  for my fruitless life

  will be like the sunsets of Autumn.

  At eighteen, Lorca was beginning to grapple with the same topics that had beset Unamuno in his youth. Despite a deeply pious Catholic upbringing, the philosopher had undergone a profound spiritual crisis in adolescence and eventually lost what he called the “serene intuition” of his childhood faith. In his controversial 1913 book, The Tragic Sense of Life, Unamuno explored the human fixation on death, noting its close bonds with love, and questioned the existence of God. Stirred by what he had seen on his travels—in particular, the sight of so many veiled nuns in Ávila who had consecrated their physical and spiritual lives to Christ—Lorca found himself similarly plagued by doubt. Like Unamuno, he resolved to gauge his uncertainty through writing.

  By the time he returned home in early November 1916, his life had subtly shifted course, and Lorca knew it. On the night of October 15, 1917—precisely one year from the date he had left Granada with Berrueta to tour Castile—he scribbled a note to himself: “One year since I sallied forth toward the good of literature.” In his poem “Proverbs and Song-Verse,” first published in The Castilian Country in 1912, Antonio Machado articulated the challenge as well as the predicament facing those of Lorca’s generation:

  Think of it: a Spaniard

  wanting to live, starting in

  with a Spain on one side of him dying

  and a Spain all yawns on the other.

  Young Spaniard entering the world,

  may God preserve you.

  One of these two Spains

  will make your blood run cold.

  4

  Crucible

  1917-18

  Late at night, after his family had gone to bed, Lorca wrote. He worked compulsively, crowding his thoughts onto small sheets of paper. Often the sun was rising when he stopped. “Another day,” he observed at the end of an essay. “Jesus! Let the star of your soul descend upon mine so that I can be with you forever. Dawn is breaking. Already I can see it growing light.”

  His early writings were a beginner’s passionate efforts to find a subject and a voice. Many works took the form of Augustinian confessions or prayers in which Lorca strove to decipher his feelings toward God and toward his fellow human beings, especially women. Quintessentially romantic, his writings were filled with an adolescent thirst for spiritual purity, f
or oneness with nature and reconciliation with society. Lorca saw himself as an artist in search of beauty but trapped by the vulgar reality of everyday life. “Am I to blame for having a heart, and for having been born among people interested only in comfort and money?” he asked, overlooking the fact that it was his father’s money that made it possible for him to indulge his fantasies. At home and in school he cultivated a romantic pose. Acquaintances took note of his “strange opinions,” his unkempt clothes, unruly hair, and sorrowful eyes.

  He drew on a variety of sources: romanticism, symbolism, Hispanic modernismo, Catholic liturgy, and above all music, which he, like Verlaine, considered a more perfect art than literature. Through writing, he sought to achieve the condition of music. He applied musical terms and titles to his works, and structured a number of early writings according to musical tempi and forms. The result was an often clumsy mingling of the arts. In this, and in his fondness for exotic imagery and florid language, he was deeply influenced by Rubén Darío, and to a lesser extent by the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. Although years later Lorca would gently flout Darío’s “delightful bad taste and his shameless use of excessive poetic phrasing,” he prized these qualities in his teens.