Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  On his way home from Valladolid he stopped in Madrid, where he appears to have met up briefly with Salvador and Ana María Dalí. The two had just made their first trip to Paris. From the French capital they had sent a joint postcard to Lorca. “We think of you constantly,” it read. Alone, Dalí had sent a second card with an image of the Eiffel Tower. On the back he scrawled a single phrase: “Another hug.”

  Dalí’s fame, like Lorca’s, was growing. In late 1925 he had held his first painting exhibition in Barcelona, at the prestigious Dalmau Galleries. A critical as well as a commercial triumph, the show caught the eye of Pablo Picasso. When Dalí visited Paris, the two artists spent several hours together in Picasso’s studio. During his stay in Madrid that spring Dalí provoked another of his short-lived scandals. Having reenrolled in Madrid’s Academy of Fine Arts after his expulsion in 1923, he showed up at the school in mid-June 1926 for a final examination. Dressed in a checked coat with a gardenia in its lapel, and bolstered by a glass of absinthe, he curtly told his examiners, “Given that none of the professors at the school … has the competence to judge me, I withdraw.” For the second time in his life, he was expelled from the institution. Dalí went home to Catalunya, intent on persuading his father to send him to Paris. He believed that in France he would “definitively seize power!”

  Lorca continued to idolize him. Each viewed the other as his most discerning audience. After his Barcelona exhibition, Dalí sent Lorca press clippings from the show, but only “the harshest criticism.” The other reviews, he explained, were of no interest “because they are so unconditionally enthusiastic.” In March 1926, Dalí confessed to Lorca that he had spent the whole of one Sunday afternoon re-reading Lorca’s letters to him. “Little son! They’re extraordinary. In each line there are suggestions for numerous books, theatrical works, paintings, etc., etc., etc., etc.” A week or so later he sent another note. “Do you love me?” he asked.

  He still wanted Lorca to collaborate with him on a book of putrefactions, and they discussed the project during Dalí’s visit to Madrid that spring. But Lorca had more pressing matters to address—chiefly the business of finding a producer for Mariana Pineda. He told his parents he intended to remain in Madrid until he had resolved the issue. After Dalí’s departure, Lorca lingered in the capital, but without results. Eduardo Marquina could not find a producer for the play, and no one else to whom Lorca showed the script was willing to take on the work. Lorca blamed the theater establishment. “This business of dealing with impresarios is one of the most repugnant things in the world, because they’re all a bunch of idiots,” he said to his parents. “The Spanish theater is in the hands of the worst riffraff, actors as well as playwrights.”

  He assured his family he hadn’t the “slightest worry or the least bit of depression. I’m naturally optimistic. And I am entirely certain that at the end of the day everything will turn out just as I want it to and as it ought to be. I have a wonderful thing called faith! I have faith in myself, as do a number of other people.” In another letter home, he blithely announced that the trick to conquering despair was to live an active life—to play tennis, to bathe every morning, and to eat prudently. “That’s how I’ve freed myself at times in Madrid from becoming too sad because of some (always small) setback.”

  After a couple of months in Madrid, Lorca left the capital empty-handed and went home to Granada for the summer. He invited Dalí to join him, but the painter declined, citing the need to prepare for his next exhibition. Unlike Lorca, who yearned for Dalí’s physical presence, the artist was content with a mostly cerebral friendship. He needed Lorca imaginatively, not physically. At least four canvases in Dalí’s upcoming exhibition bore hints of Lorca’s heart-shaped face.

  In their letters the two began to make cryptic, homoerotic references to Saint Sebastian, by coincidence the patron of Cadaqués. Dalí referred to Sebastian’s “delicious” agony and, invoking another shared icon, the fish, invited Lorca to embrace “my new type of Saint Sebastian, consisting of the pure transmutation of the Arrow by the Sole.” Both men viewed the figure of Sebastian as a provocative one, at once inviting and impassive, a perfect emblem of the emotional control each now sought to achieve in his work. Dalí called Sebastian “Saint Objectivity.” In a letter to Jorge Guillén, Lorca defined true poetry as “love, effort, and renunciation. (Saint Sebastian).”

  More so than Dalí, Lorca struggled to find a balance between his old work and his new. He continued to be inspired by Andalusia, even as he looked to Catalunya and to France for enlightenment. But it was a constant battle. While on holiday in the vega with his family that summer, he told his brother he was sick of the village of Asquerosa and its petty inhabitants. “In the country one seeks innocence,” he grumbled. “I attribute all this to the fact that there are no cows here, and no grazing of any sort.”

  Luis Buñuel wrote from Paris to ask if Lorca would consent to write a screenplay for his cinematic debut. The former athlete had decided to become a filmmaker. “You know this is a lucrative business, and I know you intend to make money, come what may,” Buñuel advised. But despite his numerous requests, Lorca refused to collaborate, and eventually Buñuel gave up.

  Late in the summer the Lorca family moved into a new summer home on the outskirts of Granada, a two-story white house that Don Federico had bought the previous year and christened the “Huerta de San Vicente” in honor of his wife, Vicenta. Lorca instantly fell in love with the place and in doing so rekindled his passion for Andalusia. Although the house stood barely half a mile from the center of Granada, it was surrounded by the damp green fields of the vega and adorned with flowers. There was so much jasmine in the garden that each morning he and his family suffered “a lyrical headache,” he told Jorge Guillén. “And yet, nothing is excessive! That’s the beauty of Andalusia!”

  His mother kept the house filled with roses. His father planted fruit trees and rows of vegetables in the garden. In time Lorca and his brother sunk three cypresses into the soil beside the dirt path that led to the house, so that from a distance the site was marked by their mournful silhouettes. From the balcony of his bedroom upstairs, Lorca could see both the vega and the towering Sierra Nevada in the distance, a view he thought “the most beautiful … panorama of mountains in Europe.”

  At night the perfume of flowers suffused his room, and the air became “divinely unbreathable.” Inspired by his bucolic surroundings, Lorca returned to Andalusian themes and resumed work on two of his more conventional projects, the Gypsy ballads and a popular Andalusian farce called The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, which he had begun two years earlier. Years afterward he described the circumstances that prompted him to complete The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife in the summer of 1926:

  I was in the city of Granada, surrounded by black fig trees, spikes of wheat, and little crowns of water… The restless letters I was receiving from my friends in Paris, who were engaged in the handsome and bitter struggle to create abstract art, led me to produce this almost banal fable with its direct reality.

  In contrast to his friends’ experiments with abstraction, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife “was like slamming my fist down on the table,” he said. Brief and raucous, like the drama Don Perlimplin, which he had finished earlier in the year, Lorca’s farce dealt with one of the Spanish theater’s more traditional themes: the marriage of a young girl to an old man. But the play lacked the tragic overtones of Perlimplín, and was, in fact, closer in spirit and technique to his puppet theater. Lorca later recalled that while writing the play during his first summer at the Huerta de San Vicente, he felt “as though I were holding happiness in my hands. I felt I was the intimate friend of all the roses in the garden.”

  The idyll did not last. He and his family moved back to their Granada apartment in the fall, and Lorca renewed his search for a producer for Mariana Pineda. He called the play, which had now consumed nearly three years of his life, “the exceedingly tiresome Mariana Pineda.” Most recently, playwri
ght Eduardo Marquina, then in his late forties, and one of the country’s best-known writers, had given the script to Margarita Xirgu, a prominent Catalan actress who ran her own theater company. Marquina, who had long supported Lorca’s literary efforts, believed Xirgu might be interested in staging the work. But weeks passed without a response from the actress. “I know her mother died,” Lorca griped to Marquina, “but that was some time ago, and besides, she’s not going to retire from the stage on account of that.”

  He knew that the theater was the only way he stood to make any money as a writer—and yet he could not seem to break into its insular world. To make matters worse, his brother had recently gone to England, where he was enjoying further success in his lustrous academic career. “My parents see nothing practical in my literary endeavors,” Lorca reported wearily to Marquina. “They are displeased with me and do nothing but point to the example of my brother Paquito, a student at Oxford loaded with laurels.”

  By late fall he had lost patience with himself, with his play, and with Marquina, whom he had never completely trusted. He lamented the time he had spent on this “disastrous venture of mine into the den of the theater.” He told Melchor Fernández Almagro that he had been a victim of “bad faith,” of “rotten people and cretinism.” He begged Fernández Almagro to speak to Marquina on his behalf—“the shameless and cavalier Marquina.” “Naturally, if Mariana were produced, I’d gain everything with my family.”

  Granada turned cold and damp. The first snows fell, and Lorca felt even more trapped. “What do I do?” he asked Fernández Almagro. “My family, annoyed with me because they say I don’t do anything, won’t let me leave Granada. I’m unhappy, as you can imagine. Granada is a hateful place to live. Here, in spite of everything, I’m drowning.” Relations with his parents had rarely been worse. “For the first time, they are opposed to my writing poetry without thinking of anything else,” he revealed to Jorge Guillén.

  In early September, Lorca abruptly announced his decision to become a literature professor. “I think I have a vocation for it (it’s slowly growing in me) and the capacity for enthusiasm,” he wrote weakly to Guillén. He claimed that his parents had “promised, if I begin to study promptly, to give me the money for a trip to Italy, which I’ve dreamt about for years.” He asked Guillén for advice on his new career. Guillén replied with amusement, “You have to start by buying yourself a card file! A CARD FILE. This practical first step will make a huge impression on your family: ‘He’s begun a card file! And index cards!’ That is, evidently you’re going to work in earnest.”

  Lorca dutifully ordered a card file (“What fantastic notes will fill it!”) and asked Guillén what he should do next. “Because I need to have a job. Just suppose I wanted to get married. Could I do that? No. And this is what I want to resolve. I’m beginning to see that my heart seeks a garden and a little fountain as in my first poems.” Lorca assured Guillén that as yet there was no “particular girl, but isn’t it imminent?”

  His own sister Concha, then twenty-three, had announced her engagement that fall to Lorca’s friend Manuel Fernandez-Montesinos, a medical student and former member of the Rinconcillo. The news had jolted Lorca, who suddenly now yearned for a conventional life, for a career that would please his parents, and for the respectability of marriage and fatherhood. In one of his earliest plays he had portrayed an adolescent Christ who dreams of “a tranquil and sweet life” he knows will never be his. Lorca, too, dreamt of a happy existence, “a garden and a little fountain.” But the events of the past two years—above all, his infatuation with Dalí—pointed in a different direction.

  Caught between his desire for propriety and his urge to flout convention, to acknowledge his sexuality, he looked wistfully back to the innocence of childhood. “Let me stay a little longer in the playground,” he wrote plaintively to Guillén, recalling a popular childhood rhyme (“To the garden of happiness / my mother sends me”), “since I’ll have plenty of time to put on gray flannel and the cold airs of meditation.” He talked idly of obtaining a position abroad as a lecturer in Spanish literature. “Paris would be ideal.” In Paris he would be free of his family and could indulge his whims, sexual or otherwise. He could go off by himself to watch the sun rise over the mountains, “with no need to be home on time. Dawn of responsibility. I’ll be responsible for the sun and the breezes. Threshold of fatherhood.” At the same time, he worried that he lacked the “aptitude” to be a professor. “Because I’m neither intelligent nor hardworking (a good-for-nothing!).”

  Guillén persuaded their mutual friend Pedro Salinas to look into the possibility of a teaching position for Lorca in France. But Salinas was skeptical. “My private opinion is that your true career is your vocation: poet,” he told Lorca. “But your father will never see that as a responsible career as long as you are not known and acclaimed publicly. And you would achieve that with books or stage productions.”

  From Cadaqués came even sterner advice. “You won’t take examinations for anything” Dalí wrote. “Convince your father to let you live in peace without all those worries about guarantees for the future, work, personal effort and other things … publish your books, for that can make you famous … with a real name and not a legendary one like you have now.” The painter reminded Lorca that he loved him “very much. One day we’ll see each other again, and what a great time we’ll have!”

  A few weeks after receiving Dalí’s letter, Lorca abandoned his plans for a university career. His flirtation with the academy had lasted just over two months. In a letter to Jorge Guillén written shortly after reaching his decision, he signed himself “Federico (incorrigible poet).”

  His three books of poetry—Songs, Suites, and Poem of the Deep Song—remained unpublished. In the ten months since announcing his plan to publish them, Lorca had come to doubt the wisdom of issuing the three simultaneously, and on the advice of friends had elected to stagger their publication. In late October 1926, he surrendered the manuscripts for the collections to fellow poet Emilio Prados, who with Manolo Altolaguirre had recently founded both a literary magazine, Litoral, and a small press by the same name in his native Málaga and was looking for material. Both men had known Lorca for years—Prados most notably in the early 1920s, when he had developed an intense crush on Lorca at the Residencia. Although the two had subsequently drifted apart, both geographically and emotionally, Prados continued to admire Lorca.

  He spent several days visiting Lorca in Granada that October. The two toured the province by car and took part in a local homage to the seventeenth-century Granadan poet Pedro de Soto de Rojas, another neglected figure from the city’s past, whose work Lorca and his Rinconcillo colleagues sought to revive. Dressed in a bulky suit, Lorca gave a short, highly poetic talk at the homage. He praised the baroque poet and his inspired vision of Granada as a “paradise closed to many.”

  Days later, Prados returned to Málaga, brandishing Lorca’s manuscripts. But his joy at having procured the collections paled the moment he inspected the handwritten documents. It was not unusual for Lorca’s manuscripts—even those he submitted for publication—to contain misspelled words, faulty punctuation, accentless syllables, coffee and tobacco stains (which he sometimes ringed with tiny drawings), in short, as Prados described it in a panic-stricken letter to Jorge Guillén, “twenty thousand unknown and indecipherable muddles … I didn’t count on this when I brought his papers with me. What’s to be done?”

  The following month, Prados and Altolaguirre published the first volume of their new literary magazine, Litoral. The issue contained three of Lorca’s Gypsy ballads. These, too, had proved difficult to transcribe, for when Lorca opened his copy of the magazine he found “more than ten! enormous errata” in the poems. The sight so grieved him that he wept. “What great anguish it caused me,” he told Guillén, “… to see them broken, damaged, without that strength and flintlike grace that to me they seem to have!”

  Both Guillén and Prados scolded Lorca for h
is carelessness. Prados returned the manuscript of Songs, the first of the poetry books Litoral intended to release, and demanded that Lorca prepare a fair copy of the book himself. His nerves were shattered, Prados said, “after translating you from the Chinese.” Lorca at first misinterpreted the gesture to mean that Litoral no longer wished to publish his books. In desperation he told Guillén that “even if it’s just the book of Songs, I want to publish it. After all, if I try to publish, it’s only to please a few friends and nothing else. I’m not interested in seeing my poems definitively dead… that is to say published.”

  Late in the year Lorca received word from Melchor Fernández Almagro that the actress Margarita Xirgu had agreed to produce Mariana Pineda. By then Lorca was so weary of the play that he could only muster a perfunctory thank you to his friend and confess his revulsion at the process he’d been forced to endure. “It’s disgusting, the theater,” he said. Fernández Almagro had to remind him to thank the many people who had helped secure the production.

  In Figueres, Dalí rejoiced at the news and begged Lorca to let him design the show. But Lorca was ambivalent about the work. He remarked gloomily to Guillén that while it had been fine to write a romantic verse drama three years earlier, he now viewed Mariana, his lyrical account of the life and martyrdom of a love-struck nineteenth-century granadina, as “peripheral to my work.” Nevertheless, he went to Madrid in March to meet with Margarita Xirgu and read his drama to her company.