Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Rehearsals began in early 1932. As artistic director, Lorca drove his young cast relentlessly. He knew precisely how he wanted to interpret each work, and he pushed his actors until he achieved his goal. He first read a given script to the cast, interpreting each role himself, much as he did when he read his own plays to friends. His voice was “incredibly malleable,” a friend remembered. “He was practically a ventriloquist.” He then staged the work, meticulously blocking his actors’ movements. He told cast members where to stand onstage and what to do at specific moments. “Not that way, no,” he would call out in the midst of a line reading. “Say it with amazement, not fear.” He often illustrated what he wanted by acting it out himself. He fretted over the rhythm of his productions. Rhythm, he said repeatedly, is the most important aspect of any theatrical performance. He also paid close attention to music, and frequently embellished nonmusical texts by adding popular songs and melodies to the original script.

  Lorca worked hard to distinguish his brand of popular theater from the conventional fare seen on the mainstream Spanish stage. He eliminated the prompter’s box from his productions and demanded that actors learn the entire play, not just their individual roles, as performers typically did in the commercial theater. He talked of establishing a seminar so that his student actors could further hone their craft and study the plays in the company’s repertory. During rehearsals he sometimes referred to Stanislavsky, whose theater, like Lorca’s, was born of frustration with the conventions of nineteenth-century dramaturgy.

  Demanding though he was as a director, Lorca neither intimidated nor patronized his actors. He rarely lost his temper, and when he gave orders he did so graciously. Offstage he fostered a spirit of friendship. After rehearsals he sometimes treated his company to tapas and drinks. “And to hell with my tiny income!” he would cry. But at the same time he maintained a certain distance from his actors, most of whom were at least fifteen years his junior. On one occasion he lost his temper with a company member who presumed to be on equal footing with him. When eighteen-year-old Alvaro Custodio, who joined La Barraca in its first season, suggested to Lorca that he include the work of playwright Eugene O’Neill in La Barraca’s repertory, Lorca replied angrily that this was not the purpose of the company, nor did Custodio have any right to make such a proposal. He fired the actor on the spot. In subsequent years the two men occasionally ran into each other, and although Lorca was unfailingly polite, neither man spoke of the incident, and Lorca never invited Custodio to rejoin the company.

  He chose La Barraca’s repertoire with scrupulous care. He did not allow the company to produce his own work (he did not want the troupe to be a vehicle for self-promotion), but instead set out to present the work of other authors: contemporary as well as classical, foreign as well as Spanish. He spoke ambitiously of producing “German, Russian, Jewish theater. The best of the old and the new. Works with the sap of the people, that can reach the people.” He even hoped to stage what he called “the great social works of Russia—but without any trace of propaganda, of course.”

  Primarily he aimed to revive and exalt the great plays of the Spanish Golden Age. He detested the blatantly romantic treatment these works customarily received. He described the divide between the theater of his own day and that of his Golden Age predecessors as a “river of meringue and hypocrisy.” He and Ugarte both believed, along with a number of their contemporaries, that by restaging the Spanish classics they could modernize the Spanish theater. Lorca insisted that Spain’s Golden Age playwrights—Lope de Vega, Calderón, Tirso de Molina, Cervantes—had given the country a “true national theater” and were “our most representative poets.”

  Accordingly, for La Barraca’s first season, Lorca chose to present three Cervantes interludes together with Calderón’s most famous play, Life Is a Dream. Lorca had long revered both authors. He had included an interlude attributed to Cervantes in the holiday puppet festival he staged with Manuel de Falla in 1923, and he had drawn inspiration from Calderón while writing both The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Audience. He once described the origin of his own theater as “Calderonian. A theater of magic.” In 1932 Lorca told Barraca audiences that through Calderón’s mystical theater one could arrive at “the great drama, the best drama, which is performed thousands of times every day, the best theatrical tragedy in the world. I am referring to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.” To skeptics who wondered why a theater troupe subsidized by a republican government should present a miracle play, Lorca explained that Calderón and Cervantes together embodied the two extremes of the Spanish theater. Cervantes was “Earth”—human, sensual, and popular—while Calderón was “Heaven”—divine, symbolic, rational. Between them lay the “whole compass of the stage and all theatrical possibilities, past, present, and future.”

  When it came to staging Life Is a Dream, Lorca himself played the role of “Shadow.” It was the second time in his life he had deigned to appear on stage in a play; two years earlier he had performed in his own The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. For Life Is a Dream he draped himself from head to toe in black tulle, concealed his hands with black gloves, and veiled his face with a huge, hornlike black headdress. With fluttering arms and a voice “as dark as his costume” he took the stage, and under a ghostly blue light pretended to reign over the creation of the world. He looked, a friend recalled, like “a Tibetan widow.”

  Lorca had rarely been happier. “La Barraca keeps him in a state of euphoria,” Morla Lynch noted in his diary that spring.

  In March, in addition to his theater work, Lorca embarked on an extensive lecture series. He gave his first talk, a new lecture-recital entitled “Poet in New York,” in Madrid on March 16. Morla Lynch was in the audience, as were many of the city’s most prominent writers. The crowd burst into applause as Lorca calmly took his place at the front of the room, sat down beside a small table, sniffed a bouquet of carnations, shuffled his lecture notes, adjusted his water pitcher, and began to speak. “He couldn’t be more serene if he were in his own home,” Morla thought.

  “Whenever I speak before a large group, I always think I must have opened the wrong door,” Lorca began.

  Some friendly hands have given me a shove, and here I am. Half of us wander around completely lost amid drop curtains, painted trees, and tin fountains, and just when we think we have found our room, or our circle of lukewarm sun, we meet an alligator who swallows us alive, or … an audience, as I have. And today the only show I can offer you is some bitter, living poetry. Perhaps I can lash its eyes open for you.

  The talk that followed was not “a lecture but a poetry reading,” not an objective account of a trip to New York but a “lyrical reaction” to the city, Lorca explained. A more accurate title for the presentation might be “New York in a Poet,” he continued. “The poet is me, purely and simply: a poet who has neither talent nor genius, but who can sometimes escape through the murky edge of the looking glass of day more quickly than most children.”

  Since returning from America two years earlier, he had read his New York poems to countless friends. Many were dazzled by the unorthodox works; others found them bewildering or even repugnant. By drafting a lecture-recital on the subject of the trip, Lorca sought both to contextualize the poems for listeners and to make sense of the collection himself, to find a cohesive arrangement for its eventual publication. “I’ll publish it later,” he said of the series in 1933.

  But first I want to make it known in lecture form. I’ll read my poems and explain how they came to be … But not all of them … All of them would be too much. It’s a huge book. Enormous. A killer book.

  More fiction than fact, Lorca’s lecture on New York presents a dramatic portrait of the poet’s encounter with the New World. Passages of prose alternate with poems to suggest an archetypal confrontation between innocence and evil, darkness and light, childhood and death. In his earliest drafts of the talk (which he continued to revise over a period of several years) Lorca dwells on the di
chotomy between black Americans and their moneyed white oppressors. Later versions of the work are less strident. But the essence of the talk remains the same: America, Lorca asserts, is a cold, racist, grasping civilization that murders its pure and betrays its poets.

  Audiences received “Poet in New York” with enthusiasm. Reviewing Lorca’s debut recital of the talk, critic Victor de la Serna wrote that the New York poem cycle constituted the “greatest achievement of contemporary Spanish poetry, both now and for some time to come.” Lorca gave the talk twice more that spring. It became a permanent part of his lecture repertoire and, as such a valuable means of honing his New York poems before he consigned them to the printed page.

  Between March 16 and May 29,1932, Lorca delivered a total of six lectures in cities throughout Spain. Several talks were commissioned by “Committees for Intellectual Cooperation,” a new, pro-republican organization designed to foster the intellectual enlightenment of the Spanish people. In addition to “Poet in New York,” Lorca gave a revised version of the deep-song lecture he had written ten years earlier. He spoke in Valladolid, Seville, San Sebastián, Salamanca, and various locations in Galicia.

  At each stop the routine was much the same. A group of admiring young intellectuals and writers would greet the celebrated poet at the train station and whisk him off to lunch. In the evening Lorca would give his lecture, followed by dinner and a nocturnal stroll through town in the company of a half-dozen or so devotees. To everyone’s delight, he invariably oohed and aahed over the city’s monuments. The following morning a glowing review of his visit would appear in the local newspaper, and Lorca would depart for his next destination.

  As a speaker he was casual, if not careless. He usually sat to give his talks, one leg crossed over the other. He read from notes scribbled on odd-sized sheets of paper. At one lecture a reporter noticed that parts of Lorca’s talk were written on hotel letterhead. He clearly reworked his talks as he traveled, jotting phrases whenever and wherever inspiration struck.

  He savored the attention he received on the lecture circuit. Journalists fawned over him. He is as “bronze” as his Gypsy characters, one reporter observed after attending a talk. Audiences, too, idolized him. In Salamanca, his listeners clapped so strenuously at the end of Lorca’s lecture on deep song that he was compelled to take an encore bow. Afterward he turned to Morla Lynch, who had accompanied him to Salamanca, and with childlike joy asked repeatedly, “Carlos, what did you think of the ovation they gave me?”

  Of all the stops on his itinerary, the place that most intrigued Lorca was Galicia, a corner of northwestern Spain known as much for its poverty as for its rain-soaked beauty. Lorca had first visited Galicia in 1917 while touring Spain with Professor Berrueta. He had been struck then by the region’s “eternal rain” and the “sweet green of the land.” On his return in 1932 he told a reporter he hoped to “write a poem on Galician themes.”

  He spent several days in the region, traveling first to the city of Vigo, then north to Santiago de Compostela. He arrived in Santiago wearing a heavy beige suit with “quite an American cut” and a red silk tie. To the poets and university students who clustered around him, he seemed the embodiment of urban sophistication. His young admirers followed him everywhere. Dazed by their proximity to fame, they hesitated to speak directly to Lorca, and instead talked among themselves in hushed tones while waiting for the poet to expound on the mysteries of his craft and the wonders of their city. Lorca did not disappoint. As he ambled along the town’s gray stone streets he talked on and on. In the Plaza de Quintana, behind the city’s majestic cathedral, he announced that because this particular square was “so closed-off, so intimate and complete,” he would like to remain there for the rest of his life.

  In groups Lorca invariably monopolized the conversation, a habit annoying to some but to others endearing. He loved to soliloquize, vaulting with ease from one topic to another, one extravagant theory to the next. He punctuated his talk with anecdotes and proverbs. He was always poetic and funny, always “daring,” a friend remembered. He knew how to please a crowd. In Santiago he indulged in one of his favorite tricks—pretending to compose a sonnet spontaneously while sitting in a restaurant, when in fact he had written the poem long ago and was merely copying it from memory to impress his admirers.

  One young man who met Lorca during his visit to Santiago was so taken by the poet that when Lorca placed a spray of flowers on the tomb of a local author, the young man, Carlos Martínez Barbeito, an aspiring poet, plucked a camellia from Lorca’s bouquet and took it home with him to dry. Before Lorca left Santiago, Martínez Barbeito dedicated a poem to him as a farewell present. Shortly afterward Lorca sent the work back; as a gesture of thanks to a reverent young fan, he’d had the poem privately printed in Madrid.

  The two became good friends. For a period of several months they exchanged richly detailed letters in which Lorca reflected on his own calling as a writer and encouraged the young Galician to pursue a literary career. “You mustn’t abandon poetry,” he told Martínez Barbeito in May. Later he asked, “Are you still writing? Don’t give it up, because you’ve got the stuff, and you must shape and polish it.” He sent books to the younger poet—“for your poetic formation”—and reminded him that poetry “is a hard discipline, but it offers the highest reward. It distances us from reality so that we are able to love reality passionately from a more tolerant and generous plane.”

  Martínez Barbeito relished Lorca’s flattery. Although few of his letters to Lorca survive, those that do suggest the depth and intimacy of his attachment to the poet. Sometime in 1932 he scrawled on a postcard to Lorca, “Do you realize that my father was standing beside me while I was writing that second letter to you yesterday?” The postcard, Martínez Barbeito added, was meant to be shared with others. “To you I won’t say anything. Why should I? You already know everything.”

  Lorca actively courted such attention from adoring young men. Besides Martínez Barbeito, he became infatuated that year with a twenty-two-year-old writer named Ernesto Pérez Guerra. Tall, thin, handsome, and intelligent, Pérez Guerra charmed Lorca from the moment they met. Although born in Galicia, Pérez Guerra had left the region as a child and moved to Madrid with his family. But he remained an ardent Galician, and when he discovered Lorca’s fondness for the region he immediately began regaling him with descriptions of Galician customs and superstitions. Lorca was enchanted.

  A profound, and apparently passionate, friendship developed between the two. Pérez Guerra later admitted to having been captivated by Lorca, not so much by his physical appearance, which except for his extraordinarily expressive black eyes was plain, but by his “presence.” Wherever he went, Lorca took command of the space around him, “and everything else became audience,” said Pérez Guerra. Lorca’s “presence” transcended his art. He was somehow “phosphorescent. He glowed from within.”

  For a brief period, Pérez Guerra became Lorca’s closest, most trusted friend and primary audience—much as Dalí had been in the mid-1920s. A sometime critic, editor, and poet, Pérez Guerra was clever, vibrant, and, according to one friend, “as beautiful as a god.” He engaged in long, solemn conversations with Lorca about books and poetry. Inspired by their friendship and by his own rekindled interest in Galicia, Lorca announced in 1932 that he wanted to write a series of poems about the region. He intended to write them in Galician, though, not Spanish. He knew the language “passively,” having heard it during his travels and in conversation with Galician friends. Occasionally, when he perceived an intriguing word in Galician, he would jot it down in a notebook, together with his observations about the region’s dramatic landscape.

  Of his urge to evoke Galicia in Galician, Lorca said later that in 1932 the region gripped his imagination “in such a way that I felt myself to be a poet of the high grass and of the lofty, slow rains. I felt myself to be a Galician poet, and I sensed an imperious need to write poetry.” Except for a few poems composed the previous sum
mer, he had largely stopped writing verse since his return from America. The theater interested him more. But he could not resist attempting a series of six brief, intensely lyrical poems that paid homage to Ernesto Pérez Guerra’s birthplace.

  Lorca was familiar with modern Galician literature, and in particular with the elegiac work of the nineteenth-century poet Rosalía de Castro, whose tomb he visited in Santiago in the spring of 1932. He was also acquainted with medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric verse, and he loved to play and sing Galician folk songs on the piano. In drafting his own Galician poetry, he drew heavily on these disparate sources. His six poems include a “Lullaby in Death for Rosalía de Castro” two works dedicated to the city of Santiago, and a ballad in which Lorca recounts a popular Galician pilgrimage. Together the poems depict an archetypal Galicia washed by melancholy rains and bounded by the sea.

  In the most personal work of the series, and also the least specifically Galician, Lorca mourns a youth who has drowned in one of the region’s many rivers. The short poem, “Nocturne of the Drowned Youth,” opens with a bleak summons whose final image recalls Jorge Manrique’s famed lyric:

  Let us go down, silent, to the bank of the ford

  to look at the youth who drowned there, in the water.

  Let us go down, silent, to the shore of the air

  before this river takes him down to the sea.

  While Lorca may have witnessed the aftermath of a drowning in Galicia during one of his visits, his poem is less about the literal death of a young man than about the figurative loss of childhood innocence in the waters of erotic love: