Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  At first he was unsure how to proceed. Months earlier he had asked Rinconcillo companion Antonio Gallego Burín, a professor at the University of Granada, for a “few notes” on the subject because “I don’t want to bungle it, do you understand?” But Gallego Burín turned him down, fearful that Lorca might plagiarize his own research on the topic. Lorca pronounced his friend’s attitude “absurd” and resolved to seek a different kind of truth by investing the past with “poetry” and “emotion,” as he phrased it. He aimed to depict Mariana as he believed she was “in reality”—Lorca’s version of reality. Instead of presenting the Mariana Pineda of history, the sensual lover and courageous activist executed for her political ideals, he would reveal the Mariana of legend, the romantic heroine of the tales and ballads he had heard as a child, the saintly Granadan beauty who died not for politics but because she loved a fellow conspirator and sacrificed her life to his cause. In order to achieve his guileless vision of Mariana, Lorca planned to invent and conflate characters, reshaping the facts of the original story to suit both his aesthetic and emotional needs. “Since childhood,” he said, “I’ve been hearing these lines, so very suggestive: ‘Marianita went out for a walk / and a soldier stepped out to meet her …’”

  The air in Granada smelled of jasmine as he set to work on his new play, and Lorca’s mind soared with lyrical images of “Mariana the lover,” a “Juliet without Romeo.” In his heart he felt he had found the right approach. Fernández Almagro praised him for having chosen to pursue the “poetic truth” over historical accuracy. He also praised Lorca’s timing. Although Lorca had turned to Mariana’s story primarily as a means of ennobling the past—his own as well as Granada’s—his choice of subject matter took on unexpected political overtones shortly after he began drafting the play. On September 12, 1923, General Miguel Primo de Rivera of the Spanish army seized control of the nation in a bloodless military coup. The country’s thirty-seven-year-old king, Alfonso XIII, yielded to him at once. Within a week, Primo de Rivera had dissolved Parliament, abolished trial by jury, imposed martial law, and suspended citizens’ rights. Thick black censorship notices began to riddle the Spanish press.

  “The political circumstances of the present moment exalt the figure of Mariana Pineda,” a weary Fernández Almagro wrote to Lorca just three days after Primo’s coup. “Our grandparents’ century is returning.”

  Spain’s new dictator was a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking Andalusian in his early fifties with a taste for bullfights, wine, and women. Two days after assuming power the general issued a proclamation stating that his new government was “a man’s movement. Anyone who feels his masculinity is not yet fully defined should wait patiently for the good days we are preparing for the Fatherland. Spaniards! Long live Spain and long live the King!”

  Many citizens welcomed the change in government. Under Alfonso XIII the country had suffered years of labor unrest at home and military incompetence overseas; even Lorca, who normally paid scant attention to such things, had complained about the nation’s hapless leaders. In the summer of 1921, Alfonso’s disastrous policy in the country’s Moroccan protectorate, where Spain’s government sought to pacify Berber tribes through a combined program of political bribery and military occupation by ill-trained conscripts, had led to a brutal rebel attack at Anwal, in which nearly nine thousand Spanish soldiers died. The political repercussions of the event had irreparably damaged the monarchy. Primo’s coup appeared to promise a return to stability. Like his idol, Benito Mussolini, the new Spanish dictator planned to impose discipline and order on his wayward nation by unifying “People, King, and Military.”

  But for Spain’s intellectual and artistic life, the coup was an appalling “step backward,” as Fernández Almagro termed it. The dictator quickly demonstrated his anti-intellectual bias. Within months of his coup he closed down the Madrid Atheneum with the excuse that the institution, one of Lorca’s favorite sanctuaries in the capital, was promulgating “strident politics.” At the same time Primo accused Miguel de Unamuno of spreading antigovernment propaganda, and expelled the philosopher from Spain. Incensed, Lorca’s friend and former professor Fernando de los Ríos sent a letter of protest to the dictator. The government promptly prosecuted de los Ríos. Ultimately he was acquitted—but the ideological battle lines were drawn.

  To his parents Lorca bemoaned the country’s dreadful politcal situation. The following year, at the behest of friends, he signed a manifesto voicing support for the Catalan language, which Primo de Rivera sought to suppress. But unlike the socialist de los Rios, Lorca had no appetite for organized politics. Its meetings, petitions, documents, and other formalities bored him. He cared about broader issues: human rights, social justice, subjects he could address through poetry and plays.

  Two months after Primo’s coup, Lorca returned to Madrid and to the Residencia, where he continued to work on his play about Mariana Pineda. He hoped to premiere the drama the following spring. In late December he attended an Italian production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, presented in Madrid as part of a rapprochement between the new regimes of Italy and Spain. Spanish critics hailed Pirandello’s unconventional dramaturgy and his ingenious play-within-a-play, which one reviewer called “a reality more real than reality itself.” The work exemplified the kind of radically innovative theater Lorca longed to see on the Spanish stage, and although he left no record of his response to Six Characters, months after attending the production he began drafting his own version of a play-within-a-play.

  He remarked to his parents that he was optimistic about his future and grateful to be in Madrid. To remain in Granada, he said, invoking a favorite image, would be to clip his wings, and he wanted none of that. Despite the parochialism of the country’s new government—or more probably because of it—Madrid’s cultural life was as vital as ever. During the spring of 1924 Lorca met and befriended a number of poets his own age, men who shared his antipathy to artistic mediocrity and his aspirations for a renaissance of Spanish literature.

  Together with Lorca, this eclectic assortment of young, mostly male writers was beginning to be seen as a “generation,” even outside Spain. Born with the century and baptized in the waters of despair that followed the collapse of the Spanish empire in 1898, they had come of age during World War I and launched their careers in the Roaring Twenties. Like their European contemporaries, they eschewed pessimism. They saw each other regularly in Madrid—at cafés, in theaters, at the Residencia—and although linked by little more than age, friendship, and circumstance, they began to think of themselves as a cohesive whole. Lorca had known at least two members of the group, the Malagan poets Emilio Prados and Manolo Altolaguirre, since childhood, and he was familiar with the work of others. In 1923, while attending Pirandello’s Six Characters, he met Vicente Aleixandre, a tall, pale blond from Seville, whose fragile health made him one of the more reclusive poets of their generation, but who warmed nonetheless to Lorca’s spontaneity and “tremendous dark laugh.”

  A few months after meeting Aleixandre, Lorca was introduced to the poet Jorge Guillén, a literature professor in his early thirties, who lived, taught, and wrote in the city of Valladolid, a few hours north of Madrid. Guillén was struck by Lorca’s vibrant personality and histrionic gifts. After spending an evening chatting in Lorca’s room at the Residencia and later hearing him recite his short play The Billy Club Puppets, Guillén wrote excitedly to his wife, “Stupendous, perfect, the Petrouchka that modern art has been searching for; lyrical, very musical, funny, dramatic, abundantly inventive, completely réussie, popular, Andalusian, with extraordinary strength and sap. Lorca reads his work as if playing each and every part of a stage company and an orchestra. He’s a poet and then some. Lorca is the best among us, I have to believe it.”

  Guillén found Lorca irresistible—his charm, his effervescence, his apparently constant creativity. “Federico’s here,” he used to cry whenever Lorca arrived at a gathering. “Now we’ll
go on a poetry bender.” He cautioned others against trying to resist the ebullient granadino: “It’s no use … Federico will devour you.” After one of many visits with Lorca in the 1920s, Guillén remarked to his wife, “Federico continues to make us laugh, in a state of true, superhuman, poetic happiness.” He described the “court of friends” who invariably surrounded the charismatic Andalusian.

  Lorca’s room at the Residencia soon became one of the most popular meeting spots in Madrid. So many people used to crowd into it to hear him read that his friends called the place “the tram.” Lorca relished the attention. Night after night he sat enthroned on his daybed, a crowd of young men massed around him—standing, sitting, lying curled up beneath the table—while he read from his work, pulling pages of poetry from a notebook he kept bound with red tape. He was a sensation, a “modern minstrel,” the “last bard.”

  He read simply but with commanding authority. Some maintained that the secret to his power lay in his eyes, which conveyed all the mystery and emotion of his verse. Others claimed it was his voice, with its dark sounds and rustic accent. He could be pompous. As he read, his chest swelled and he punctuated words with gestures. To suggest the moon opening and closing “its tail,” he moved his thick hands back and forth like a fan. To signal the end of a poem he sometimes held a rolled napkin to his forehead and let it fall like a curtain over his face. Occasionally, to heighten the effect of an image, he tugged at someone’s arm. Audiences clung to his words. Whenever Lorca read his poems, a friend remembered, “he gave the impression that he was writing them. It was like attending a birth. His own poems surprised him.”

  He preferred reading his poetry to publishing it. “When I correct proofs, I experience the inevitable sensation of death,” he complained. “The poem no longer lives.” He cared so little about preserving his work that he gave away copies of poems at random. At tertulias he taunted admirers by destroying manuscripts before their eyes. “Here’s a poem I’ve written for you,” he would shout to some friend, an accomplice familiar with the routine, who would then put a match to Lorca’s work and use it to light a cigarette. Luis Buñuel once salvaged what he could of some of these charred poems; years later they turned out to be the only extant copies of Lorca’s suite “Water Jets.”

  Because he refrained from publishing his poetry, it began to circulate informally, and what one journalist called a “García Lorca state of mind” evolved. Few writers had published less and yet were more celebrated. In virtually no time, Lorca emerged as the leading poet of his generation. He did so as much by force of personality as by the quality of his work. Other writers began to imitate his ostentatious recital style. The phenomenon took on a name: lorquismo, “that Lorca business.” As Lorca’s circle of fans grew, so did his ego. He began to view himself in historic terms. When he agreed to pose for a series of sketches by the artist Gregorio Prieto, he told Prieto, “With these portraits of me we’ll both be immortalized. They’re every bit as good as the ones Velázquez did of Góngora.”

  Hungry for praise, and eager to share his work, he courted new listeners, “virgin” audiences. A consummate performer, he knew precisely how to woo a crowd. Rafael Martínez Nadal, a university student who met Lorca in 1923 at the home of a mutual friend, recalled that during their first encounter someone asked Lorca to play the piano. “Oh, I feel terrible!” Lorca muttered, taking a handkerchief from his suit pocket and dabbing at his face, before sitting down at the piano and plunging into a series of popular Spanish songs. For his final tune he sang a bawdy habanera:

  My father’s cu-chu-cha

  is bigger than mine,

  for last night I took a peep

  when he was fast asleep.

  Lorca’s voice crackled with amusement. He then swung around from the piano and launched into a sequence of dramatic sketches. To Martínez Nadal’s delight, he improvised a dialogue between two Granadan gossips, followed by a make-believe Mass, for which he imitated a priest with a cold, a dozing altar boy, and a squeaking door. Someone asked if he could read some of his poetry. Lorca paused momentarily, composed himself, then embarked on a recital of his latest work. His audience was enthralled.

  Shortly afterward, Martínez Nadal, an impetuous teenager with a ramlike face and coiled blond hair, told Lorca that while he liked his poems, he wasn’t sure if it was because they were “really good or because you read them so well.” Lorca was caught off guard by the young man’s candor. “You rotten little bastard!” he cried. “Tomorrow I’m going to leave a stack of poems at your house and next week I’m coming back to hear you criticize them.” To Lorca’s surprise, Nadal turned out to be a perceptive critic, and Lorca began taking poems to him on a regular basis. He enjoyed Rafael’s brash humor and irreverent take on life, and he welcomed his literary insights. From Nadal, Lorca accepted criticism that from others he might have dismissed. The two shared secrets, nicknames, inside jokes. Alone with Nadal, Lorca relaxed, ceased his theatrics, and revealed a more private, solitary self, one preoccupied with death and with the enduring sadness of the human condition.

  He became a regular guest at Nadal’s home and a friend to Rafael’s mother, Lola. The entire Nadal household succumbed to his wiles. Whenever Lorca arrived for dinner, the cook would hug him with her floury arms and send him to the table to see what she’d made. When Nadal wasn’t home, Lorca sometimes dropped by to visit his friend’s mother or to browse in Rafael’s library. Left on his own, he once sketched a young man’s face inside Nadal’s copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. “Don’t say anything to Rafael,” he cautioned Doña Lola, “but when he comes home he’s going to find a surprise or two.” It didn’t occur to Lorca that Nadal might object to having his book defaced, for among disciples like Rafael, he knew he could do no wrong. And in fact, when Nadal came home and discovered the drawing, he was charmed.

  But even Nadal acknowledged his friend’s constant need to show off. In tertulias Lorca flaunted his knowledge of literature. He once broke into a conversation about Goethe’s Faust—a work that had long intrigued him—to offer his own, highly personal interpretation of the book. On another occasion he delivered a complex appraisal of Joyce’s Ulysses, despite the fact that he had never read the book. Days earlier he had heard a friend summarize the novel in conversation, and from that synopsis he had absorbed enough information to feign knowledge of the work.

  To those who were pretentious about their scholarship Lorca was merciless. “Jesus, you know a lot!” he would exclaim in a show of mock admiration. His own approach to literature, as to life, was serendipitous. Blessed with a nimble mind and a prodigious memory, he drew much of what he knew about books, especially foreign ones, from talk with friends. He could recite obscure literary passages at a moment’s notice. But he was coy about the source and scope of his erudition; it was part of his mystique. He once claimed to have read only two books in the world, the Bible and the Thousand and One Nights. (“The Bible has Heaven and the Thousand and One Nights has Earth. Who needs more?”) On another occasion he bragged of having gone through periods when he read two books a day “as an intellectual exercise.”

  Martínez Nadal eventually concluded that Lorca read far more than anyone suspected. But he was no pedant. He culled from books, and from conversations about books, only what he needed for his writing. According to another friend, whenever a literary work was discussed in his presence, “Lorca would deftly separate the grain from the chaff, invent whatever was lacking in order to complete the picture, and store the whole thing away in his mind for future reference.”

  Brimming with confidence, Lorca returned home for the summer in late June 1924. He brought with him the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez and his wife, Zenobia. The couple had decided to spend a brief holiday touring Granada in Lorca’s company. Together with Paco García Lorca, the three traveled south by rail from Madrid. As their train entered Granada province, the Andalusian-born Jiménez murmured, “Oh, I can smell the thyme!” Eager to please his distinguished guest, Lo
rca leapt from his seat to open the window so that the balmy scent could suffuse the car.

  In Granada, he introduced his visitors to his family and friends and, with his family in tow, took the couple on a tour of the city’s principal sights: the cathedral, the Albaicín, the Alhambra, and the Generalife gardens, where Jiménez fell into rapture at the sound of so much running water. Along a cypress-lined path in the gardens, the ensemble paused to have their picture taken. While others in the group stared straight at the camera, Lorca glanced shyly at Jiménez, his young face a radiant blend of reverence and pride.

  Although the two men had seen each other frequently in Madrid and had collaborated on a handful of projects, it was not until his visit to Granada that Jiménez came to appreciate the full scope of Lorca’s mercurial personality. The older poet watched with amusement as Lorca raced through the city on his stocky legs, laughing obstreperously and pausing from time to time to sing ballads with his sister Isabel, by then a charming fourteen-year old. The childless Jiménez found the entire Lorca family enchanting and Granada itself a marvel. Not long after his visit he sent a letter to Isabel, in which he vowed to return to the city in order to fill himself “to the gills with Granada.” He added that as a result of his stay, his “fondness” for Lorca had “turned into a deep affection.”

  Lorca was jubilant. Having now dealt “intimately” with the great Jiménez, he told Melchor Fernández Almagro: “I’ve been able to observe what a profound sensitivity and divine quantity of poetry his soul possesses. One day he told me, ‘We’ll go to the Generalife at five in the afternoon, the hour in which the gardens begin to suffer.’ This paints a full-length portrait of him, doesn’t it?” In subsequent months, Lorca endeavored to render his own portrait of Jiménez in two brief poems, “Juan Ramón Jiménez,” and a second, “shadow” poem, “Venus.” Coolly impersonal in tone, both works reflect the older poet’s stated devotion to a pure, unsentimental verse, and allude to his mania for silence and isolation, “the infinity of white. / Snow. Spikenard. Salt flat.”