Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  In Málaga, the pace of work on Songs quickened. With a production of Mariana looming, Prados and Altolaguirre hoped to capitalize on Lorca’s impending renown by issuing his new poetry collection in time for the play’s premiere. Lorca scrutinized the copy for the book until he had each poem “just where it wants to be.” Proud of his workmanship, he told Fernández Almagro, “I’m happy. I’ve omitted [some of the] rhythmic songs despite their success because I want the book to have the high air of the sierra.” He thought Songs “great poetry (great in the sense of nobility and quality, not of worth),” and he predicted the book would provide “surprises for many and happiness for a few.”

  Songs appeared on May 17, 1927, three weeks before Lorca’s twenty-ninth birthday, in a handsome paperbound edition. Lorca dedicated the collection to the three friends who had been his most trusted confidants while preparing the book: Jorge Guillén, Melchor Fernández Almagro, and Pedro Salinas. Privately, Lorca called them “my three weaknesses.”

  He described the volume itself as a “book of friends.” Many individual poems carried inscriptions to friends or to the children of friends. Leafing through his new copy of the book, Jorge Guillén was charmed to find a poem dedicated to his young daughter, “Mademoiselle Teresita Guillén, playing her six-note piano.” Guillén slipped a photograph of the child into the book at that spot. He told his wife that Songs was “formidable. Brilliant. The best one of all. It contains the most offbeat, most adorable things.” Lorca’s poetry, he said, was “divine.”

  The collection included nearly ninety poems written between 1921 and 1926. Their short lines and airy refrains were redolent of popular Spanish songs, especially children’s songs, but their veneer of childlike innocence was deceptive. Even the most impish of works in the collection reveals Lorca’s poignant understanding of human nature:

  Mama.

  I wish I were silver.

  Son,

  you’d be very cold.

  Mama.

  I wish I were water.

  Son,

  you’d be very cold.

  Mama.

  Embroider me on your pillow.

  That, yes!

  Right away!

  Awash with traditional Andalusian settings and motifs, Songs—like Book of Poems and Poem of the Deep Song—shows how completely Lorca had absorbed the lore of his region. But the collection is more than simply an exercise in the neopopular. Through a combination of humor and obscurity, coupled with an emphasis on metaphor and a studied avoidance of the personal, Lorca reveals his infatuation with the trends of his day: pure poetry, haiku, Góngora. The collection exudes a sense of confidence and delight: in the possibilities of structure and rhythm, in the sorcery of words. One contemporary reviewer pronounced it “new, new, new. Terribly new. Avant-garde!”

  Above all, Songs exemplifies the notion of a “dehumanized” art. By avoiding the confessional tone and romantic clichés of his earliest work and replacing these with what Ortega y Gasset called “the higher algebra of metaphors,” Lorca achieved a new level of poetic composure, in which he neither hides nor confesses anything. Relatively few poems in Songs possess any sort of narrative voice, and those that do are evasive. “The song / I will never say, / has fallen asleep on my lips,” says the unnamed speaker in the poem “Verlaine.”

  Language allowed Lorca to do on paper what he longed to do in life: prevaricate. Songs is filled with terms such as “mute,” “echo,” “shadow,” and “mirror”—words that enabled Lorca to stress the layered nature of truth. Throughout the collection surfaces mislead, shadows contradict, and personality is mutable. “I used to be. / I once was. / But I am not,” confides the narrator of “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.” (While at work on the collection, Lorca admitted to Melchor Fernández Almagro that in “everything” he found “a painful absence of my own and true person.”)

  Lorca’s interest in concealment sprang partly from his growing need to suppress certain aspects of himself. In Songs he hints at his ambivalent feelings toward love and sex. His evocations of heterosexual love are occasionally tinged with a sense of regret:

  The girl goes through my brow.

  Oh, what ancient feeling!

  …

  Full moon brunette.

  What do you want of my desire?

  The collection includes the series of “erotic poems” Lorca wrote in 1925 in the wake of his first, impassioned visit to Dalí in Cadaqués, poems that exude a triumphant—if ironic—male sexuality. In “Song of the Fairy,” part of another series called “Games,” Lorca writes with amusement of a “fairy” homosexual in a silk dressing gown who “arranges / the curls on his head” while his neighbors watch from their windows and smile.

  In a complex series of six poems entitled “Three Portraits with Shadow,” Lorca intimates his unease with the female sex (“No one would love you like me / if you’d only change my heart!”) and seems to embrace love of the self, or those like the self. True to the overall concept of the book, it is only in the so-called shadow poems—“Bacchus,” “Venus,” and “Narcissus,” each of which appears in smaller type after its “portrait,” respectively, of Verlaine, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Debussy—that Lorca ventures to signal the truth, and then he does so obliquely, relying on metaphor to convey what he cannot speak. “Boy! / You’ll fall into the river,” he warns in “Narcissus.” “Deep down there’s a rose / with another river inside.”

  As in all of Lorca’s work, there is an undertow of loss and sorrow in Songs, and a sometimes acute consciousness of human mortality, but despite the collection’s occasional sobriety, it is the most buoyant volume of poetry Lorca was to create. Individual poems have titles like “Silly Song,” “Useless Song,” “Sung Song.” Many are dedicated to Lorca’s friends at the Residencia (one inscription reads: “to Luis Buñuel’s head. En gros plan”), and the collection as a whole is marked by the sort of high-spirited fun that characterized life at the Madrid institution.

  In shaping the book, Lorca had sifted through almost six years’ worth of poems, many of which he had originally written for other collections, chiefly Suites and Poem of the Deep Song. As a consequence he had also had to rethink each of those books. The process caused him “genuine anguish,” he said. But in the end he was pleased with the results. “The songs remain girded to my body and I am master of the book,” he told Jorge Guillén. “A bad poet… very well! But master of my bad poetry!”

  Any doubts he had about the collection were groundless. Songs was Lorca’s first definitive book, a leap forward in the evolution of his style, and while it received scant critical notice at the time, those who did review it were struck by its originality. El Sol’s Ricardo Baeza praised Songs as “a poetry of codes and arabesques.” Luís Montanyá, writing in the avant-garde Catalan journal L’Amic de les Arts, called Songs “pure poetry … an authentic book of poems.” And Enrique Díez-Canedo, who the year before had criticized Lorca for his sloth in getting his work on to print, extolled Lorca’s “penetrating poetic vision.”

  Dalí voiced his qualified approval of the book. Although he claimed to prefer the poetry of “a nickel-plated motor” to that of an old Granadan song, he nevertheless admired Lorca’s “delightful songs.” Yet he could not refrain from noting that Lorca’s lyrical vision of a timeless Andalusia no longer suited a world that had just seen Lindbergh cross the Atlantic. “Your songs are Granada without trams, without even airplanes,” Dalí wrote. He conceded, however, that Lorca would go on doing whatever he wished. “That much we already know.”

  11

  Celebrity

  1927

  At twenty-three, Dalí was on the brink of international fame. In late 1926 he held his second painting exhibition in Barcelona. The show drew buyers from Paris and a representative from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute, who purchased two Dalí canvases.

  In February 1927 the Spanish army drafted the artist for nine months of military service. “Carísimo amigo” Dalí wrote to Lorca in M
arch. “You can’t imagine. I’ve been a soldier for one month!” Being in the army was a lark. “I’m strong from boxing and very suntanned,” he reported in May. He missed Lorca: “Now we’re beginning to need our madnesses, our wanderings about, our tears and our laughter, and our hunger!”

  Nearly a year had passed since their last rendezvous in Madrid. With Mariana Pineda slated to open that summer in Barcelona, they expected to see each other soon. In late March Lorca went to Madrid to meet with Margarita Xirgu to finalize plans for the production. From there he intended to go to Barcelona to begin rehearsals. He told Pepín Bello it was the start of a new era for him: “I’m saying goodbye to Segovia and Toledo. That’s how it must be. I dream of Paris and another, more enjoyable life.”

  But he needed money for the trip, and his father, exasperated with Lorca’s spending habits, hesitated to give it. His parents were especially put out with him because during his brief stay in Madrid in March, he had squandered a large amount of money. He claimed it wasn’t his fault. Upon his arrival the Residencia had been full, he explained, and he had been forced to eat in cafés and stay in a costly hotel (the cheaper places were too far away to accommodate his “theater life”). He had also found it necessary to send a bouquet of roses to Xirgu and to host a banquet for several journalist friends in order to persuade them to go to Barcelona later in the season to review Mariana. “The money disappears like water,” he said. “I’m not a spendthrift.”

  His father viewed matters differently. For years he had indulged Lorca financially. A two-month allowance sometimes vanished in three days—spent on little more than outings with friends. In letters home, Lorca invariably asked for money, time and again insisting that his expenses were “necessary.” His requests could be blunt: “Send me fifty pesetas in your next letter. I need it.” Usually his parents obliged him. They sent money so that he could buy food, shoes, hats, a new winter coat. “You know that we want you to be decently dressed and not to have to beg things from people,” his mother wrote.

  But in the spring of 1927 his father balked, and threatened to withhold funds for Lorca’s trip to Barcelona. Lorca was devastated. In a six-page letter defending himself and his goals—yet another plea for parental respect—he promised his father that he would “more than repay” the expense of the trip once he had collected his earnings from Mariana. Why begrudge him the money he so desperately needed—especially now, when he had just spent ten months in Granada “with three and a half pesetas to my name (so to speak)”? If his parents refused to pay his way, he would simply go back to Granada and stay there. Xirgu could produce Mariana “any way she likes, and with the scenery and the acting as she sees fit. Anything to keep from upsetting you.”

  Worn down from years of argument, and newly reminded of his son’s unyielding determination, his father relented. By mid-May, Lorca was on his way to Barcelona.

  In his soldier’s uniform Dalí was as dashing as a Hollywood star. Tall, suntanned, slim, he posed coolly beside Lorca not long after the poet reached Barcelona that spring, and the two had their picture taken. Dalí wore his hair brushed neatly back from his porcelain face; he placed his hands in his pockets and extended one uniformed leg gracefully in front of the other. Beside him Lorca looked young and unrefined. He wore a rumpled gray suit and held his hands stiffly together in front of him. An acquaintance who met him during his visit to Catalunya in 1927 recalled that he “exuded ‘south’ from every pore.” Powerless to match Dalí’s urban polish, Lorca traded on his rustic Andalusian roots. He cheerfully mocked the ardent Catalan nationalism then rampant in Barcelona, telling one local reporter, “I’m from the Kingdom of Granada!” He began wearing a red carnation in his lapel.

  Throughout the two-month rehearsal period for Mariana Pineda, Lorca shuttled back and forth between the Dalí home in nearby Figueres and a hotel room in Barcelona, which he and Dalí sometimes shared when Dalí was able to get leave from the army. The two friends wandered the city together, lost in passionate conversation about art and aesthetics, or about Lorca’s play, which Dalí had agreed to design. Lorca deluged the painter with sketches and photographs of typical Andalusian settings. He praised Dalí’s “shrewdly intuited” take on the play’s design, while Dalí, in turn, gamely applauded Lorca’s “sophisticated sentimentality.”

  On Sunday afternoons they often attended a weekly tertulia in the spartan apartment of Rafael Barradas, the bohemian artist who had created the designs for Lorca’s first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. Stretched out on the floor, Lorca, Dalí, and their friends discussed music, literature, theater, film, dadaism, and surrealism. As usual, Lorca dominated the conversation. He frequently sat at Barradas’s rented piano and belted out popular songs. No one objected, because whatever he said or did was “so terribly interesting,” remembered Sebastian Gasch, a rotund Catalan art critic who met Lorca in Barcelona that spring and quickly yielded to the granadino’s “fiery, young, impulsive character.”

  Gasch, like others, was struck not only by Lorca’s ebullience but by his abrupt changes of mood. Once, after contentedly listening to a group of Gypsy singers in a local café, Lorca suddenly fell silent. His companions asked what had happened, but he refused to speak. In due course he confessed, with a touch of melodrama, that he had been thinking about death. At times he seemed to Gasch oddly pensive, even devout. One night he told his friends he had to go home early so that he could attend Mass the next morning at the cathedral. Smiling softly, he rolled his dark eyes skyward and murmured something about the “aroma of ancient pomp” he always experienced inside the huge Gothic church. Dalí pointed toward the table where they sat and said, “I’m more interested in this olive.”

  It was this side of Lorca—contemplative, reverential, nostalgic, even maudlin—that had led him to write Mariana Pineda. As he watched his play come to life that spring in Barcelona’s Teatro Goya, Lorca must have felt he was recovering some part of his lost childhood. During rehearsals he worked meticulously with the chorus of children who were to sing the ballad of Mariana Pineda at the beginning and end of his play. Seated at a piano, his hands racing “nervously, easily” over the keyboard, Lorca went over the song with his young actors until they understood its essence as clearly as he did. At the final dress rehearsal, a reporter asked him to explain what he had hoped to accomplish with Mariana. Lorca answered that he wanted to show his love for “these old things”—for Mariana herself, for the nineteenth-century engravings he and Dalí had attempted to recreate onstage, for the popular ballad about Mariana that he had first heard as a boy. “Perhaps,” Lorca mused, “the entire work is nothing more than an example of variations on the theme of the popular ballad.”

  He was far more comfortable with Xirgu’s production of Mariana Pineda than he had been with the Madrid premiere of The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. Dalí’s childlike designs for the show delighted him—there was nothing “picturesque” about the artist’s use of Andalusian motifs, Lorca told Manuel de Falla—and he thought Xirgu’s portrayal of the doomed Mariana “wonderful.” He was profoundly indebted to the Catalan actress. She alone, he told a journalist, had dared to produce Mariana after “all the companies in Spain that pride themselves on being artistic” had rejected it. She had not only been willing to stage the play, but she had agreed to spend a large sum of money on it—a fact Lorca proudly reported to his family.

  He and Xirgu enjoyed an easy rapport. During their first meeting, earlier in the year, he had regaled the actress with the story of his woeful debut as a playwright in Madrid in 1920. He told the tale with obvious enjoyment, lingering over the details of his public humiliation. He described how he had cowered in the basement of the theater as the audience above him stomped its disapproval of his play. Xirgu was charmed. She shared Lorca’s addiction to the stage, and she loved his robust laugh—a laugh, she said, that seemed to emanate from the vowel O.

  Her patrician looks belied Xirgu’s working-class origins. She was a statuesque woman with a strong, s
quare face, black eyes, and a dark voice. José Ortega y Gasset, one of her many admirers, wrote that Xirgu’s arms formed “curves of harmony.” Lorca found her riveting, and later described her as “the actress who breaks the monotony of the footlights with breezes of innovation, who flings handfuls of fire or pitchers of cold water onto the dozing public.”

  As a child she had given makeshift theatrical performances on her family’s dining room table; at ten she had appeared in her first amateur production. She made her professional debut on the Catalan stage at eighteen, and by her early thirties she was known to audiences throughout Spain and Latin America as both a formidable actress and a shrewd producer who ran her own theater company with fellow actor Enrique Borrás. The 1922 Nobel laureate, Jacinto Benavente, wrote plays expressly for Xirgu.

  The actress was thirty-eight when she premiered Mariana Pineda. To capture Lorca’s gentle heroine, she softened her usually severe makeup and concealed her dark hair under a mass of shiny blond curls. The audience loved her. On opening night, June 24, 1927—the Feast of Saint John, a day Lorca adored—cheers erupted at the end of each act, and Lorca was called onstage repeatedly to bow beside Xirgu. Flushed with excitement, he gripped the actress’s hand and whispered, “Even the old folks are clapping! Even the old folks are clapping!”

  Later that evening, as he strolled along the winding gray streets of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter with Xirgu and a handful of friends who had attended the opening, including Salvador and Ana María Dalí, Lorca reenacted the curtain calls he and Xirgu had been asked to take. In a brief, unexpectedly melancholy charade, he bowed solemnly to an imaginary audience. Watching him, Ana María Dalí thought to herself that he was unable to experience or even conceive of joy without acknowledging its antithesis. Eventually the group made its way to a sidewalk café, where Lorca impulsively asked a female street performer to join them. “But without speaking,” he instructed the woman. “Like a carnation.”