Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  He relied on Cummings to translate for him. The young American proudly took his distinguished Spanish guest around town and introduced him to some of its more peculiar inhabitants, including two elderly sisters who served Lorca jasmine tea. Inside their curious house, Lorca spotted birds’ nests clinging to the rafters. He was struck by the fact that the people of Eden Mills cheerfully accepted such eccentric women. In America, he advised his parents, “everything is tolerated… except social scandal. You can have a hundred mistresses and people know it and nothing happens, but just wait until one of them denounces you and whips up something in public. Then there is no hope for you socially.”

  Initially, Lorca delighted in the small town. He likened its outhouses to priest’s confessionals and its rotting tree stumps to castles. One day he tore a piece of birch bark from a tree and scribbled a note on it to his sisters in Granada. “The title of this letter is ‘Autumn in New England,’” he wrote. He spent hours sitting by the lake, talking or working intermittently with Cummings on an English translation of Songs. When it wasn’t raining, the two hiked through the woods. They came upon a working talc mine, and also an abandoned village, whose decaying buildings left Lorca sad. “The vanished people,” he murmured. “Where are they?” To his parents, he described the forested landscape as “acutely romantic.”

  Although his friendship with Cummings was apparently platonic, Lorca soon found the American’s constant attention cloying. By the end of his visit, he was desperate to leave. It rained without stop. In the morning, mists shrouded the lake outside his bedroom, stirring old memories. He was reminded of his childhood, lost, now, in the damp fogs of the vega. On the back of a photograph taken of himself standing beside Lake Eden in a white, V-necked sweater he wrote: “Me, on the lake, half sportsman and half altar boy.” He was trying to be funny, but there was a melancholy edge to his remark. In the photograph, Lorca stands by himself on the stony shore of a motionless lake, a lone figure in an unfamiliar landscape. Beyond him, a range of faint gray hills folds into an empty sky.

  He yearned to recover some recognizable image of himself. He spent hours writing poetry at Lake Eden. He wrote anywhere, on anything. Sometimes he sat, hunched, on an overturned boat, scribbling verse on the back of an old envelope, absorbed in the cadences of his native Spanish. The damp woods and brisk, late summer sky worked their way into poems steeped in loss and longing. The very name of the lake led Lorca to envision himself as a pilgrim in search of an unattainable Eden, a paradise capable of releasing him from the earth’s pull and providing “love at the end without dawn. Love. Visible love!” He understood the futility of his quest: “I won’t be able to complain / though I never found what I was looking for.”

  His surroundings rekindled thoughts of childhood, of a vanished Arcadia where he did not need to mask his identity with the conceits of language. In “Double Poem of Lake Eden,” one of three poems he completed in Vermont, Lorca summons “my love’s voice from before … voice of my truth.” For an instant it returns to him, a fleeting reminder of his boyhood self, as present but irredeemable as his own reflected image in the waters of Lake Eden. He dreams of shedding the lies of adulthood:

  I want to cry saying my name,

  rose, child, and fir on the shore of this lake,

  to speak truly as a man of blood

  killing in myself the mockery and the suggestive power of the word.

  But the vision fades, and time presses on. “I was speaking that way when Saturn stopped the trains / and the fog and Dream and Death were looking for me.” Years would pass before his poetry spoke with the level of candor Lorca desired.

  The leaves were beginning to change color, and Lorca ached to rejoin his Spanish friends, to return to his own language. “It doesn’t stop raining,” he wrote gloomily to Angel del Río, who was spending the last weeks of summer with his wife and infant son in the Catskill Mountains. Lorca hoped to join them shortly. “This family is very nice and full of gentle charm,” he said of the Cummingses, “but the woods and the lake plunge me into a state of poetic desperation that is most difficult to bear. I write all day and at night I feel exhausted.” There was no liquor in the cottage, and he urgently needed cognac for his “poor heart.” He was drowning, he said, in the mists of Eden Mills. Four days later, on the morning of his departure from Vermont, he told Philip Cummings, “You’re going to bury me in this fog.”

  In Bushnellsville, New York, Angel del Río and his wife waited all day for Lorca to appear. Despite their pleas, he had neglected to tell them what time his train was due to arrive. By nightfall they were distraught. At last, a taxi appeared on the dirt road leading up to their farm. Lorca was leaning out of one of the windows, shouting hysterically. Unable to communicate with each other, he and the driver had been lost for hours. The fare was enormous. Del Río paid the bill and ushered Lorca into his home. Later, Lorca insisted the taxi driver had tried to rob and murder him in a dark corner of the forest.

  He relaxed in Bushnellsville. He took walks, sang songs, pretended to study English with Amelia del Río, and fussed over his friends’ three-month-old son, Miguel Angel. When Amelia developed a brief throat infection, the child spent several nights in Lorca’s room. Angel went in to check on his son early one morning and was startled to find Lorca awake, kneeling beside the baby’s basket. “Look, the child’s dead, he doesn’t move,” Lorca said, terrified by the sight of the sleeping infant.

  He spent nearly three weeks in the Catskills. During his stay he continued to write poems—works whose titles betray his private preoccupations: “Nocturne of Emptied Space,” “Landscape with Two Graves and an Assyrian Dog,” “Ruin.” He befriended the children of the farm’s caretaker, a boy and a girl named Stanton and Helen Hogan, and months after leaving Bushnellsville he composed a poem about each child. He portrayed them as emblems of innocence in a menacing world. The cancer that afflicted the children’s father in real life became, in Lorca’s poem “Little Stanton,” an epidemic that beats “like a heart” in the rooms of the boy’s house and “wants to go to bed” with the ten-year-old child.

  In the poem “Little Girl Drowned in the Well,” the abandoned rock quarries that lay just beyond the Hogans’ farm became a watery tomb for a virginal child. Years later Lorca claimed that during his visit to Bushnellsville, Stanton Hogan’s young sister, “Mary,” had fallen into a well and drowned. The shock of her death sent Lorca reeling back to New York City. But in fact no one died during his stay in the Catskills, least of all young Helen Hogan. Lorca’s poem was the product of landscape and solitude and of the poet’s lifelong obsession with death by water. Lorca himself said the girl’s “drowning” in America reminded him of a similar incident in Granada, and it may have been true. Drownings in wells were not uncommon at the time. But Lorca’s infatuation with the subject transcended the particular. His image of the chaste child trapped by the “mossy hands” of the well touched on deep-rooted fears that even he could not fully articulate. In his mind, he said, the two drowned girls “became the same child, who cried and cried, unable to leave the circle of the well, in the unmoving water that never reaches the sea.”

  Lorca had been away from Manhattan for just over a month when he returned to the “frenzied” city on September 21,1929, and settled into a cell-like cubicle on the twelfth floor of Columbia University’s towering John Jay Hall. His new room held little more than a bed and a desk, but the view from its solitary window was magnificent. To the north he could see the dark curve of the Hudson River and, “spanning the horizon,” a great bridge “of incredible strength and agility”—the George Washington Bridge, then under construction. To his parents he described the landscape as “prodigiously impressive.” And yet his claustrophobic surroundings made him wistful for the gentler panoramas of Granada.

  His neighbors in John Jay Hall were mostly loutish American football players, he said, who stretched and yawned and sneezed in public with the nonchalance of animals. “This is a totally savage
people, perhaps because there is no class system,” he told his parents. He found it all but impossible to communicate with his fellow residents. Most of the time he resorted to sign language. Or he simply kept to himself. According to one resident, Lorca sometimes spent whole days in bed, refusing to emerge even when the buzzer in his room summoned him to a telephone call or a visitor.

  He made friends with a pair of Spanish-speaking American students named John Crow and Francis Hayes, who lived a few doors down the hall. Crow remembered Lorca dropping in at all hours of the day and night to talk about art, artists, American blacks, or the Gypsies and Arabs of Spain. More than once Lorca bragged that he possessed Arab blood himself. He liked to dramatize the most insignificant events of his daily life, and he showed a morbid interest in death—especially violent death. Crow eventually tired of Lorca’s spontaneous, late-night visits and his irrepressible ego. Lorca was capable, Crow said, of holding forth for hours on his work, his fame, his international success, and his role as the “pinnacle” of achievement within his distinguished family.

  Other Americans enjoyed Lorca’s bravado. Through friends he met several of New York’s most ardent Hispanophiles—people who had lived and worked in Spain and who spoke the language. Among them was a rangy, soft-spoken southerner named Herschel Brickell, an executive at Henry Holt Publishing Company. Brickell and his wife, Norma, lived in a lavish apartment on Park Avenue; their living room held a new concert grand piano and enough space for a hundred visitors. On his first visit Lorca gazed longingly at the gleaming piano and confessed that he would like to play. He soon became a regular guest.

  Through music he could talk to anyone, even English-speaking New Yorkers. At the Brickells’ home he enthralled other guests with his boisterous renditions of popular Spanish songs. “I don’t even worry about making a fool of myself,” he admitted privately to his family, “for I have never seen kinder, more innocent… and more intelligent people.” He belted out songs in his coarse, unpolished voice and waited for the inevitable cries of Olé, más! before moving on to the next piece. People who knew nothing about Spain crowded around the piano to hear him play. One night in New York the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia heard Lorca perform and pronounced him “phenomenal. Phenomenal. He electrified people.”

  To most, his charm was irresistible. Herschel Brickell was mesmerized by Lorca’s “lively and eloquent hands,” which seemed to flutter as quickly as his mind. Over dinner Lorca told endearing stories about Spain. He explained, once, how his mother had meticulously taught him American table manners in preparation for his trip to New York. But as a child, he added, he had been allowed to blow bubbles in his water glass. He laughed out loud at the memory. Brickell thought him a genius at conversation. Like so many others, however, he was struck by Lorca’s mood swings. One moment he was a capricious child, regaling friends with his antics. Then suddenly he turned into an ageless creature “who had plumbed the depths of evil as often as he had soared to the heights of good.”

  It was this darker side of himself that Lorca continued to voice in his poetry. Long after midnight, in the solitude of his cramped room high above the city, he wrote. He produced more than a dozen poems during his three-month stay in John Jay Hall, including the final two sections of his “Ode to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar,” and another pair of works on the subject of Christ. Nostalgia mingled with rage in these poems to yield both a searing critique of urban America and a mournful tribute to his departed youth.

  Just two weeks after moving into John Jay Hall, Lorca wrote one of his most disturbing New York poems, “Childhood and Death,” a work in which he imagined himself a little boy in a sailor’s suit, drowned in a well:

  Drowned, yes, completely drowned, sleep, my child, sleep.

  Child defeated in grade school and in the waltz of the wounded

  rose,

  amazed by the dark dawning of the thighs’ soft hair,

  amazed by his own man chewing tobacco in his left side.

  Twice he included his name, “Federico,” in the poem, but he later removed it, possibly because he did not wish to identify himself so closely with the dead boy, whose rat-eaten body lies alone at the bottom of the well, among “cold moss and tin lids.” But the work’s autobiographical references—to Lorca’s boyhood failures in school and to his turbulent passage through puberty—are implicit. “Alone, here, I see they have closed the door on me,” he writes. His boyhood has become nothing more than a rat scurrying “through a dark, dark garden,” a rat that “between its tiny teeth” carries a golden streamer from a child’s coffin. Shortly after completing the poem, Lorca sent it to his friend Rafael Martínez Nadal in Spain, “so you can see my state of mind.” When Nadal reminded Lorca of the poem years later, Lorca swore he never wanted to see it again.

  Nadal was among the few correspondents to whom Lorca revealed the bleakness of his situation that fall. To others he painted a joyful picture of himself in New York, surrounded by American friends and making “rapid progress in English.” His family, in particular, received detailed narratives of his prosperous life in Manhattan. “I am more responsible than ever,” he said. He professed to live frugally. At John Jay Hall, he spent 55 cents a day on a meal that included “soup, a platter of meat with potatoes, peas, beets, and sauces, a piece of cake or apple pie, a glass of iced tea with lemon, and a cup of coffee with milk or a glass of milk.” As a result of the good food, he was putting on weight.

  But he found it impossible to live on the monthly allowance his father sent him. He repeatedly asked for more money—additional allowance funds, royalties from his books—so that he could reap every possible benefit from his visit abroad. He especially wanted to see theater in New York. By Spanish standards, the American stage was revolutionary, and Lorca quickly realized its potential to influence his own work. “One must think of the theater of the future,” he told his parents in October. “Everything that now exists in Spain is dead. Either the theater changes radically, or it dies away for ever. There is no other solution.”

  Although Broadway dazzled him, it was the city’s fringe companies that most intrigued Lorca. He especially enjoyed black revues, where the actors were the best he had seen anywhere. He attended at least one performance of Chinese theater and came away thinking that Chinese drama was one of the world’s great “blocks” of theatrical literature; the sparse settings and broad histrionics of the form confirmed Lorca’s sense of the theater as artifice. The fact that he understood neither Chinese nor English scarcely mattered. He was entranced by the sheer spectacle of theater in New York, by the technological wizardry of American scenography and the high quality of American acting and directing. “New York is a unique place for taking the pulse of the new theatrical art,” he said, Courageous, non companies, such as Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre, thrived. Daring new plays were not only tolerated, but honored. One year before Lorca’s visit, the Theatre Guild premiered Eugene O’Neill’s controversial nine-hour drama about sublimated passion, Strange Interlude; the play ran for over four hundred performances and received the 1928 Pulitzer Prize. In Spain, such a work would almost certainly have been heavily censored or banned.

  Lorca relished the freedom of the American theater. When some of his new acquaintances began talking about staging an English version of his play Don Perlimplín, he rejoiced. “Not only would it advance my career,” he told his parents, “it would be beautiful to arrive in New York and have them perform here what was shamefully banned in Spain or what no one wanted to put on ‘because there’s no audience for it.’” He also harbored hopes for New York productions of both The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Billy Club Puppets. But in the end nothing came of any of these projects.

  Meanwhile, he began work on a new script in New York. He declined to elaborate on the nature of the play, except to say that it was linked to his quest for a “theater of the future.” He was equally smitten by American movies, especially talking pictures, for which h
e had a childlike fascination. “In the talkies you hear sighs, the breeze, and even the faintest sounds, all faithfully reproduced,” he said. In Spain, Lorca’s passion for silent films had led him in 1928 to attempt a short prose piece on Charlie Chaplin, in which he defends the tenderness and sentimentality of the actor’s art—his capacity for “unbridled weeping”—and contemplates Chaplin’s androgynous nature.

  In New York he went further and, with the help of a young Mexican-American artist named Emilio Amero, drafted a film script. One night after viewing a short, abstract film Amero had produced, Lorca chatted excitedly about Spain’s vanguard cinema. Although he had not seen the film, he talked with some degree of familiarity about Un Chien Andalou; the controversial Dalí-Buñuel collaboration had opened that summer in Paris and been widely discussed in the Spanish press. With his friends’ film evidently in mind, Lorca sat down with Amero shortly afterward and began outlining a screenplay. Each time an idea occurred to him, Lorca grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper and jotted it down. The next day he returned with more ideas. The completed script filled twelve small sheets of notebook paper.

  As he struggled to transform his ideas into cinematic images, Lorca relied on Amero’s superior knowledge of the medium. “Go ahead,” he often said. “See what you can do with this. Maybe something will come of it.” The finished script consisted of seventy-one separate episodes; Lorca titled it Trip to the Moon, possibly in homage to the Jules Verne film that played in Granada in Lorca’s youth. But in contrast to Verne’s more tangible journey into space, the voyage Lorca outlined in his screenplay is an erotically charged, often violent trip toward death. The script was a visual counterpart to his New York poems, especially those about childhood and death; in both works, sex obliterates childhood and is virtually indistinguishable from death.