Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Within minutes chaos erupted. A man in a box seat began shouting, “This is for Atheneumites! Intellectuals go home!” Jeers and insults rattled the small theater. People stomped their feet. Lorca’s friend Manolo Angeles Ortiz feared the balconies would collapse. He and Lorca’s other companions tried to drown out the noise with applause. “We can’t hear the work!” someone cried out. Moments later, when an actor costumed as a scorpion announced that he had just eaten “ten flies,” the crowd burst out laughing. Somebody called for insecticide. The cast struggled valiantly on.

  Lorca tried to make light of it. “I’m visibly moved,” he joked backstage to a friend, seizing on a journalistic cliché. “But ‘invisibly’ I’m very calm. I don’t care a bit about the audience.” He later claimed to have spent the evening in the theater basement, near the actors’ dressing rooms, where the clamor from the audience was so loud he felt as though the crowd was “stomping on my head!” During the intermission he slipped into the lobby to see his friends, who were having an “awful time.” They marveled at Lorca’s apparent serenity.

  In the middle of the second act a beautiful young dancer named Encarnación López Julvez, “La Argentinita,” appeared as the wounded butterfly, and her beguiling performance, to music by Edvard Grieg, briefly pacified the audience. Lorca later credited her with having redeemed the evening. Still, hisses and snide remarks continued to mar the production. During the final curtain call, theater personnel barred Lorca from joining the cast onstage because they feared for his safety.

  Afterward, as Martínez Sierra’s company geared up for its third performance of the evening, Lorca and his friends went off to a café to drink hot chocolate and go over the night’s events. On his way out of the theater, Melchor Fernández Almagro ran into Lorca’s elementary school teacher, Antonio Rodríguez Espinosa, who now lived in Madrid and was eager to know how his former pupil had fared. “I didn’t want to go inside. I could not have withstood the vicissitudes of the opening night,” Espinosa confided.

  In Granada, Lorca’s family waited with equal anxiety for word of the play’s debut. Don Federico had arranged with a banker friend to wire them with news of its reception. “The work was not a success,” the banker wrote in his telegram, adding tactfully, “All agree Federico is a great poet.”

  Critics shared the banker’s perception. “In order to create poetic theater, one must think first about creating theater,” wrote one reviewer, who characterized The Butterfly’s Evil Spell as a fine lyric poem but not a stage play. Manuel Machado, brother to the poet Antonio and critic for Madrid’s La Libertad, suggested that “Señor García Lorca” should in the future stick to writing verse.

  Other reviewers savaged the work. They called it elitist, a play for snobs; they attacked its vague language and weak allegory, its “conventional” symbolism and vulgar choice of subject matter. The Heraldo de Madrid compared the drama to a night at the zoo. Many noted the fractious nature of the opening night. One writer complained that he was unable to judge a work that, strictly speaking, he had not heard. He blamed the disaster on “the highly esteemed poet Señor García Lorca,” who could have prevented the fiasco by not writing his play in the first place. Lorca may have taken heart from the words of El Sol’s José Alsina, who urged the young dramatist not to be discouraged by his bad luck, for his aspirations were “extremely noble and his versification noteworthy.”

  On the surface Lorca took the debacle in his stride, and even laughed about it. Privately, it shook him. After months of believing that celebrity was within his reach, he had failed on a grand and highly public scale. He later refrained from listing The Butterfly’s Evil Spell as his first theatrical production. To a friend he said it was “the classic debut of every new author. The work wasn’t very good.”

  The Butterfly’s Evil Spell closed on March 25, 1920, after four performances. Years afterward Lorca remarked dryly that his first play received “one consecutive performance.”

  6

  Portrait of Youth

  1920-21

  Within weeks of the play’s opening, Lorca’s father demanded that he leave Madrid and return home at once to finish his university degree. The landowner had had enough of theater and poetry. Years earlier he had watched his uncle Baldomero ruin himself on dreams of art and glory, and he had no desire to see his son do the same. He threatened to go to Madrid in person to fetch Lorca if he refused to obey.

  Lorca panicked. In a four-page letter crowded with exclamation points and misspelled words, he begged his “dear Papa” to reconsider. “What am I supposed to do in Granada? Listen to a lot of foolish conversation, and be the butt of envy and dirty tricks (naturally, this only happens to men of talent).” Although his father may have lost confidence in his future after the fiasco of The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, Lorca had not. “Someday I will probably have a great name in literature,” he said. If his career seemed momentarily stalled, it was merely because he was proceeding “with leaden feet in order to give birth to a sensational book.”

  “You cannot change me. I was born a poet and an artist, just as others are born lame, or blind, or handsome.” Like Don Quixote, with whom Lorca compared himself, he had embarked on a path, and “neither wolves nor dogs” could make him turn back. Seizing on a new image, one he would repeatedly invoke, he implored his father to let him keep his “wings. I can assure you I will know how to use them … And don’t consult about all this with friends who are lawyers, doctors, veterinarians, etc.—mediocre, nasty little people—but with Mother and the children.” He closed his letter by reminding his sixty-year-old father how much he loved him.

  Don Federico relented. Worn down by years of argument, and by the sheer force of his son’s ambition, he agreed to let Lorca stay in Madrid until late June 1920. A giddy Federico wrote home to ask that pictures of his family be sent to him. He particularly wanted a portrait of his father, he said, so that “I can have the pleasure of putting it over my bed.”

  In early May, he began work on a new play. He was determined to put the experience of The Butterfly’s Evil Spell behind him. Years later Lorca gave this timeworn advice to a young writer whose first play had fared poorly: “You must force yourself to write something immediately. The first thing horseback riders do when they take a spill is to get right back on the horse. Go back and ride again, believe me.”

  His new play, a derisive portrait of Jehovah in old age, told of a wrathful God who orders his son Christ to be bound in chains because the young man’s “lunatic” behavior endangers the status quo. Lorca completed twelve pages of the script, then abandoned it. But the effort, the third in an early series of patently autobiographical attempts to dramatize Christ’s life, allowed him to romanticize his own domestic squabbles. Despite his father’s concessions to his demands, Lorca continued to chafe at the constraints he felt his parents—and, more generally, society—imposed on him, and he sought ways of saying so. In late May, in a brief profile of a young guitarist for a Granada newspaper, he described his subject as a restless and melancholy youth, “like all of us who are unable to flaunt the splendid wings that God has placed on our shoulders.”

  He returned home in late June to find himself under renewed pressure from both parents to finish his university degree. This time his father tried bribery. “If you’d pass some exams this September,” he told Federico, “I’d let you go to Madrid with more joy than if you had crowned me emperor.” Lorca realized he had no choice but to comply. “Little by little the domestic mole of family love has been undermining my innocent heart, convincing me that out of duty and civility I ought to complete my shipwrecked career as an undergraduate,” he confided wryly to Antonio Gallego Burin, a former Rinconcillo colleague who had recently joined the faculty of the University of Granada. “It pains my father to see me with no career other than my emotion about things.”

  He worried about the detrimental effect school might have on his writing. In the quiet of his father’s farm in Asquerosa, where he and his
family were to spend the summer, he had begun work on a number of projects, including a series of innovative poems, the concision, subtlety, and optimism of which revealed a new Lorca, one whose adolescent angst had been tempered by age and by his contact with other poets in Madrid: “I am thirsty … for new songs / without moons and without irises, / and without dead loves.”

  “Must I, Antonio of my heart, abandon my children without raising them, tears of my spirit and flesh of my heart, to caress the cold tomes of dead histories and moribund concepts?” he asked Gallego Burín. “Or will I be able to bear both burdens with ease?”

  Lorca pressed his friend for information about which university courses were easiest to pass. His plan was simple but devious: he intended to show his father “a few passing grades in September to give him a thrill,” then go to Madrid and publish books. He coerced another Rinconcillo friend, literature scholar José Fernandez-Montesinos, into helping him cheat in an exam in Spanish literature. Montesinos warned Lorca that if he were caught, there would be “hell to pay.” But Lorca persisted. In September he took and passed examinations in both world history and Spanish literature. Although he failed an exam in the history of the Spanish language, his father was sufficiently impressed with his performance that he consented to let his son return to Madrid.

  Lorca’s Rinconcillo friends sent a curt note to the professor who had issued his only failing grade that September, informing the man that by his deed he had earned a “memorable place in the biography of a great poet, whose work will do more for the Castilian language than all [your] years of ordinary and incompetent teaching.” A short-lived scandal ensued.

  On his return to Madrid, Lorca transformed himself into a model son. He settled into the Residencia and promptly enrolled in two philosophy courses. “I am utterly engrossed in the things I’m doing, because I have resolved to renew myself, to renew myself constantly,” he assured his parents. He promised to let them know “everything I do, buy, and think.”

  To friends at the Residencia, Lorca extolled his family’s charms. “My father is extraordinary, and my mother—what can I say? And Paquito is so talented! Jesus! And my sisters!” He was especially fond of his youngest sister, Isabel, a frail, dark-eyed eleven-year-old whom he called “mi niña Isabelita.” In letters home he asked anxiously if she was eating properly and had put on weight. He told of toothaches and other afflictions, projects and ideas. At one point he announced the “great news” that he had just purchased a Gillette razor. When his father suggested that he wrote home only for money, Lorca grew indignant. Such an accusation, he said, “does not befit your esteem for me.”

  He was closest to his mother, to whom he sent bonbons on her saint’s day, and in letters addressed as “my child.” Vicenta Lorca not only understood her son’s aspirations but embraced them. While she applauded his decision to study philosophy, for instance, she reminded him that his writing “is more important than all the careers in the world, or, better yet, is the best career of all, both for you and for me.” In dozens of neatly scripted letters, his mother praised Lorca’s talent and cautioned him not to lose time or abandon hope. “I am positive that, God willing, you will see your dreams come true.” But Doña Vicenta knew her son well. Midway through the fall semester she observed, “I can see you’ve made yourself into a real student, at least in appearance. You know that way we’ll stop bothering you.”

  In letter after letter, she talked of the extent to which she and her husband missed Lorca when he was away. His father, she informed him, was so desperate to hear from Lorca that he rarely left home until the morning post had arrived, and he spent a portion of every afternoon waiting outside his club in Granada for the second post. As for Vicenta, she so longed to see her son that she claimed she was capable of boarding an airplane—“forgetting that it could kill me”—and flying to Madrid.

  Lorca shared their nostalgia. As winter approached and Madrid turned damp and cold, he felt increasingly homesick for Granada. He asked his family to send him more pictures of themselves. To Emilia Llanos, a fashionable granadina in her early thirties whom he had known for several years, he remarked that he remembered his hometown “as one should remember a sweetheart who has died and as one recalls a sunlit day of childhood.” His friendship with Llanos was another of Lorca’s chaste attachments to women, founded largely on a shared passion for literature and art. He asked Llanos if the leaves had fallen yet in Granada. “Here in Madrid, the trees are already skeletal and cold. On only a few does a little leaf remain, and it moves in the sad wind like a golden butterfly.” He too was sad. “In my soul I feel the bitterness of being bereft of love. I know this gloom will pass … but the telltale sign remains forever!”

  He was conscious of time passing, of another generation coming to replace his own. In November one of his oldest friends, Manolo Ángeles Ortiz, a former member of the Rinconcillo who now lived in Madrid with his wife, Paquita, became the father of an infant daughter. Throughout Paquita’s pregnancy, Lorca doted on the couple. One day he took Paquita to the park to “look at pretty things so that your baby will notice them, too.” Asked to be the child’s godfather, he accepted with enthusiasm, and at her baptism gravely promised to instruct tiny Isabel Clara Angeles Ortiz in the Christian doctrine.

  His own children, he said, were his poems, “and I love them very much.” But although he had written more than a hundred poems by early 1921, he had published fewer than twelve. He was shy about his verse, so much so that Juan Ramón Jiménez took it upon himself to arrange for the publication of several of Lorca’s poems in two prestigious literary journals. “He is so timid that in spite of what I’ve said to encourage him, he hasn’t dared send the poems directly himself,” Jiménez told the editor of one of the journals. Jiménez regarded Lorca as one of the country’s “true” young writers.

  Others also urged him to publish. Playwright Eduardo Marquina and director Gregorio Martínez Sierra each talked of bringing out a collection of Lorca’s verse. Lorca spoke brightly to his parents about the prospect of a book, but at heart he was ambivalent about publication. His mother was keen for him to bring out a book and wrote, “You mustn’t content yourself with the admiration of a few. That isn’t enough. Many, many people must know of you—everyone.” Lorca was skeptical. He had rushed into publication with Impressions and Landscapes and then regretted it; shortly after the book’s release he told a friend that when it came to publication, no writer should compromise his ideals. The disastrous premiere of The Butterfly’s Evil Spell had only confirmed his thinking—and taught him, besides, to loathe what a friend called “the precarious publicity of newspapers and magazines.” To his parents Lorca acknowledged that “irresponsibility and impetuosity” were lethal to fine art.

  He was eager to do justice to his poetry, which at this stage of his career meant more to him than either his prose or his plays. Asked once why he insisted on reading his poems aloud, he slapped his hand against his chest as though pressing a sheaf of verse to his heart and answered, “To defend them.” He was fundamentally an oral poet who preferred the direct response of a live audience to the filtered rewards of publication. On those rare occasions when he did surrender a poem to a magazine or journal, he did so “with a sense of rupture and a secret repugnance, like a mother who sends her son off to the army,” remembered José Mora Guarnido. Lorca was more succinct. “I publish only for my friends,” he said.

  In 1921 it was a friend who ultimately persuaded Lorca—“almost by force”—to publish his poems in book form. Gabriel García Maroto, then twenty-nine, was an enterprising painter and publisher who owned a small print shop in Madrid. Maroto was known for the elegance of his publications, a fact that pleased Lorca, who told his parents he had no intention of issuing an “ugly” edition. “I want the book to come out to my liking, since I’m its father.” His own father agreed to fund the costs of publication. Maroto offered to let Lorca edit the book himself—a condition Jiménez had advised him to seek, for by doing
so he could control both its content and design.

  Lorca asked his brother, Paco, to help him select and assemble a collection of poems from the mass of verse he had written since 1917. He found the selection process itself tortuous because, as he told his parents, “you’re confronting your own work and every line becomes an immense wave that engulfs you.” He worked fastidiously, rejecting poems with too many literary allusions and toiling over revisions to those that remained. As he reread his work and corrected proofs, he felt increasingly like a poet, “a pure poet, an exquisite artist, which is what one ought to be.” Unwilling to settle for “cheap popularity and the applause of the ignorant,” he viewed himself as a lone crusader for lyrical purity. “The fight I must wage is enormous, for on the one hand I have before me the old school, and on the other I have the new school. And here I am, from the newest school, chopping and changing old rhythms and hackneyed ideas.”

  His mother offered her customary support. “As far as the public is concerned, you must be cold-blooded,” she warned, “because unfortunately people’s tastes are old-fashioned, and therefore you moderns will have to fight hard until you prevail.” She assured Lorca that she would pray to the Virgin “to help you and to make everything turn out well, and to grant you peace of mind, and not to let you suffer for any reason.”

  Throughout the first months of 1921, Lorca worked on his book. He devoted much of his spare time to helping Juan Ramón Jiménez organize an upcoming visit to Spain by the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whose work Lorca had long admired. It was soon apparent to both his parents that Lorca was neglecting his studies. When at the last minute Tagore’s visit was canceled, his mother scolded him for having let the project distract him from his real work: “Federico, don’t waste time, for these are the best years of your life.” “Be more like your brother, who works hard, and you see how he is rewarded. Give each thing its due, but no more than that.” Vicenta begged Lorca to publish his book and finish his degree, if only to please his father, for “if he’s happy, then I am too.” She urged him not to waste time with friends.