Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Within the next few months Lorca hoped to bring out his volume of sonnets as well as a collection of “Old Spanish Songs (For Piano and Voice)”; The Divan at Tamarit was slated for publication later that spring. The previous year he had published both Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías and a French translation of his Gypsy Ballads. There was growing foreign interest in his work. In Spain, publishers were competing for the rights to Yerma. Lorca kept them at bay. “I’m so lazy I keep forgetting about it from one day to the next,” he said. His mother told journalist Pablo Suero that the only way to get her son’s work into print was to “take all his papers away from him and give them to the press.”

  At heart Lorca remained hesitant to publish. “I don’t believe a poet should produce too much,” he had said in 1935. “One should be demanding. Scrutinize what you’ve written, take a close look at a book before hurling it out into the market.” By early 1936 he was still wrestling with his projected collection of New York poems. He intended to call the collection Poet in New York, and to dedicate its third section, “Streets and Dreams,” to “Rafael R. Rapún,” with an epigraph by Vicente Aleixandre: “A paper bird inside the breast / says the time for kisses has not arrived.” He predicted that his volume of New York poems would exceed three hundred pages and “will be so heavy you can kill someone with it.”

  In late 1934 or early 1935, in the immediate wake of the Asturian revolution, he had begun work on a new play. The Heraldo de Madrid, which published an ample account of Lorca’s “feverish” theatrical activity in the “Rumors” section of its February 12, 1936, edition, described the new drama as an “ultramodern work” about an acute social problem, a play in which stage and audience are indistinguishable, and theatergoers participate directly in the action. Lorca had not yet chosen a title for the play, although he admired Calderón’s phrase “life is a dream.” Eventually the Heraldo revealed that Lorca planned to call it The Dream of Life.

  He referred to the work variously as a “comedy,” a “drama,” and, on at least one occasion, as a “political tragedy.” Its links to the Asturian rebellion were striking. During the course of the action a revolution erupts, gunshots are fired, soldiers take over the streets, bombs fall, a worker is killed, and a panicked public tries to force its way into the theater for safety. From the outset the play is confrontational. It opens with a long prologue by its Author, who informs viewers that he has no intention of entertaining them but will instead show them “a tiny corner of reality,” will shout “simple truths you do not wish to hear.” “If you believe in death, why this cruelty, this indifference to the terrible pain of your fellow beings?” he demands. “… Why must we always go to the theater to see what is happening and not what is happening to us?”

  In early 1935, during Margarita Xirgu’s special after-hours performance of Yerma for the actors of Madrid, Lorca had called for a “theater of social action,” one that “takes the social and historical pulse” of its nation. He had begun work on The Dream of Life at approximately the same time he was drafting the talk. In the prologue to his play he reiterates key points of the speech: that the commercial stage is both decadent and deadly, that true theater must shock, that acting forces an encounter between life and dream. The same ideas emerge in the prologues to Lorca’s puppet plays and The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, and a theater piece called Dragon, begun sometime between 1928 and 1930 and never finished, in which a stage director attempts to startle his bourgeois audience by insisting they scrutinize the duplicity of their lives and relationships.

  The Dream of Life is the most blatant of Lorca’s efforts to shape a confrontation between stage and audience. The Author warns spectators that nothing they see onstage will be invented, that its angels and shadows are “just as real as lust, the coins you carry in your pocket or the latent cancer in a woman’s breast or on a merchant’s weary lip.” The play itself recapitulates the ideas set forth in the prologue. A theater company is rehearsing a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when a revolution occurs outside the theater; in the ensuing tumult, spectators crowd onstage together with actors costumed in Shakespearean dress. A woman audience member cries out for her children and is coached by an actress to alter the inflection of her scream. “Her voice has a false air about it that will never succeed in moving anyone,” the actress explains. The line between dream and reality blurs. Actors fear for their props, spectators for their offspring. The Author demands that the doors of the theater be opened so that people on the streets can take refuge inside: “I don’t want real blood to be shed next to the walls of deception.”

  Although he did not elaborate on its technical innovations, Lorca proudly described the first act of the play—the only extant act—as a “completely subversive act which assumes a veritable technical revolution, an enormous advance.” In drafting the script he appears to have been influenced by the German director Erwin Piscator, whose militant productions of the 1920s used film, cartoons, treadmills, and other devices to show the bonds between dramatic situations and real-life events. Lorca admired Piscator’s achievement in having established a “true theater of the masses, a theater of revolutionary education,” but he faulted the director for having failed to adapt his efforts to a broader public. With The Dream of Life, Lorca hoped to create a bona fide people’s theater, one stripped of artifice (“the silver goblets … the ermine costumes”) and devoted to truth.

  He described his play as a blend of social and religious themes, which together reveal “my constant anguish about the great beyond.” According to Margarita Xirgu, who heard parts of the script in 1935, the play’s second act was to take place in a mortuary, and its final act in a heaven filled with “Andalusian angels.” The actress recalled that Lorca intended for the play’s Author to die on the streets in the midst of the revolution. The fictive transformation the Author undergoes during the course of the play—from a man once exclusively interested in art to an activist who fights for the workers—indicates the real-life challenges Lorca and the members of his generation faced as a result of the Asturian revolt.

  The Dream of Life is both poetic and confrontational, fantastic and real. It is closest in style and content to The Audience, a work that likewise explores the contradictions between truth and fiction, actor and audience, and that takes as its fundamental premise the production of a play by Shakespeare. In The Audience, the play-within-a-play is Romeo and Juliet, a work Lorca once confessed he wished he had written. In The Dream of Life it is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a text incidental to The Audience and critical to Lorca’s first produced play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. As a teenager Lorca had been so struck by Shakespeare’s comedy that he said it “poisoned” his soul, for it taught him to view love as fickle, if not cruel. He admired Shakespeare’s phantasmagoric plot, and in his own effort to create a full-length, theatrical “dream” he so adroitly mixed the improbable with the quotidian that the two are indistinguishable.

  His use of Shakespeare’s comedy of love to underpin a play in which revolution erupts and workers are murdered underscores Lorca’s growing conviction that the sexual is ultimately political. The Author in The Dream of Life describes Shakespeare’s play as a “somber plot” whose various parts together “demonstrate that love, whatever kind of love it might be, is an accident and doesn’t depend on us at all.” This, he acknowledges, is a “terrible” but useful truth, one vital to a society rent by hatred and intolerance. “A destructive truth can lead to suicide,” he advises. “What the world needs now more than ever are comforting truths, truths that are constructive.”

  By the start of 1936, the Second Spanish Republic was in the midst of its twenty-sixth governmental crisis. Internal squabbling and two massive financial scandals had discredited the administration of Prime Minister Alejandro Lerroux, forcing Lerroux from office in the fall of 1935. Gil Robles, leader of CEDA, had prepared to assume power. But President Niceto Alcalá Zamora refused to sanction the move, in part to avoid alienating the Left a
nd in part because he rightly suspected Gil Robles of having helped foment government instability in order to usurp control of the country. To settle the crisis Zamora dissolved the Spanish parliament in early January 1936 and called for national elections to take place the following month. Chastened by their defeat three years earlier in the last national elections, and newly invigorated by a series of mass, pro-Left meetings conducted by Manuel Azaña in the latter half of 1935, the country’s left-wing parties briefly, and with difficulty, set aside their differences to forge a Popular Front. Despite right-wing propaganda to the contrary, the Spanish Popular Front was not a creation of the Comintern but a socialist-republican coalition hearkening back to the first days of the Republic. Its existence nonetheless convinced members of the extreme Right that a Moscow-based Spanish revolution was imminent. Within days of the Front’s establishment, the right-wing leader Calvo Sotelo, head of Spain’s Monarchist Party, called for military force to combat the “red hordes of communism” threatening the nation. Sotelo warned that if Spaniards did not elect a conservative government in the upcoming elections, a “Red Flag” would fly over Spain.

  On several occasions Lorca had lent his support to Russian and communist causes. Together with a hundred or so others, his name appeared on a 1933 registry of the “Association of Friends of the Soviet Union,” a Madrid-based organization. Although leery of endorsing all facets of the Russian Revolution, and unwilling to join the Communist Party, he had from time to time expressed his admiration for Soviet literature, art, and film; he especially liked The Battleship Potemkin, with its wealth of “revolutionary feelings” and impressive “armies” of workers. In late 1935 he admitted that he was “eager to know Russia personally.”

  He was not alone. Most of his friends—writers, artists, actors, students in La Barraca—were caught up in the pro-communist, antifascist dialectic of the moment, and openly took sides in the struggle. On Sunday, February 9, 1936, one week before the national elections, Lorca joined fellow writers, trade unionists, and members of the working class at a banquet to honor the communist poet Rafael Alberti and his wife, María Teresa León. The couple had left Spain in 1934 to visit Russia, but after learning in February 1935 that their apartment in Madrid had been searched—in all likelihood by Gil Robles’s right-wing adherents—they had postponed their return until late 1935, shortly after the collapse of Lerroux’s coalition government and Gil Robles’s consequent loss of authority.

  At the banquet, Lorca read a manifesto in support of the Popular Front and the Republic; the document was subsequently published, with some three hundred signatories, under the title “Intellectuals with the Popular Front.” Mundo Obrero, the official newspaper of the Spanish Communist Party, mentioned Lorca’s reading in its account of the Alberti-León banquet. The mainstream press also noted Lorca’s presence at the event, together with other prominent liberal writers and the outspoken communist Dolores Ibarrurí. After the banquet, Lorca posed for a photograph with Alberti, León, and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who now lived in Madrid with his wife and child. Buñuel and Lorca had reconciled their differences in the early 1930s, and for some time had been comfortable, if not close, friends. The four stood together in the cold, arms and hands interlocked, smiling at the camera, their faces bright with optimism.

  Five days later—two days before the elections—Lorca took part in a second politically charged tribute, this one in honor of the Galician playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán, who had died in early January, at the age of sixty-nine, after a long illness. An inveterate liberal and vocal proponent of the Republic, Valle-Inclán had at one point waged an unsuccessful campaign for election to parliament. On his deathbed he had voiced his hope for a left-wing victory in the February elections. His posthumous homage was deliberately timed to coincide with those elections. Lorca read poems by Rubén Darío at the tribute. In their coverage of the event both Mundo Obrero and El Socialista noted Lorca’s participation.

  On Sunday, February 16, election day, Lorca, his parents, José Fernandez-Montesinos, and the Argentine journalist Pablo Suero posed for a portrait as they sat inside the family apartment, at a table set for lunch. At thirty-seven, Lorca’s face resembled his father’s: round and thick, with heavy jowls and vibrant eyes. He wore his black hair plastered against his head. Don Federico himself had aged markedly. Then seventy-six, his hair and mustache were completely white; the skin on his face hung in loose folds. He stared at the camera with apparent exhaustion. Beside him, his sixty-five-year-old wife looked as she always had, serene and shy. Vicenta Lorca’s gray hair rose in waves from her plump, finely featured face; a hint of melancholy filled her eyes. A day earlier she had told Suero, “If we don’t win [the elections], then we can say goodbye to Spain!… They’ll throw us out—that is, if they don’t kill us!”

  On election day voters throughout Spain remained calm, except in Granada province, where scattered violence and death threats prevented some citizens from voting. Elsewhere, tens of thousands of Assault and Civil Guards ensured the safety of the country’s polling sites. By the end of the day, the left-wing Popular Front had won both the popular vote and a majority of seats in parliament. But their victory was fragile. Had the right-wing National Front merged with the Center, the two parties combined would have possessed a slight numerical majority. As the election results became known, jubilant crowds at first poured into the streets of Madrid, sowing panic among right-wing circles. Later the city fell unaccustomedly silent. Under pressure from conservative factions, the government decreed a State of Emergency. Dance halls and nightclubs closed their doors. The usually hectic Puerta del Sol sat empty. There was little sign of the young men and women who days earlier had surged through the capital, sporting red armbands and leftist slogans.

  The conservative press wasted no time in denouncing the vote. ABC declared the newly re-elected Republic “essentially revolutionary” and noted the radical bias of its constituents. On February 17, the day after the elections, rumors of a possible military coup spread through Madrid. Army generals Manuel Goded, Angel Rodríguez del Barrio, and Francisco Franco were in actuality then conspiring to overthrow the new government; only their suspicion that the army was not yet ready for a coup prevented them from taking action.

  On February 19, Manuel Azaña assumed power as the new prime minister of Spain. Azaña maintained an official State of Alarm throughout the country, with strict press censorship. He signed a general amnesty for all political prisoners, an act intended primarily to liberate republicans jailed as a result of the Asturian rising. On February 21, Azaña’s new minister of war, General Carlos Masquelet, issued a series of military postings. These included orders that Francisco Franco be removed from his government post as Chief of the General Staff and sent to Las Palmas to serve as Comandante General of the Canary Islands. Franco viewed the posting as “banishment,” and his resentment of the Republic blossomed into aggression. In the Canaries, where he was kept under government surveillance, Franco talked openly of his admiration for Mussolini, and resumed plotting a military coup.

  In the weeks immediately following the elections, members of the Left staged parades in Madrid and other large cities. In Granada, where the election results and charges of electoral corruption had split the public into opposing factions, massive demonstrations—some of them violent—by both right- and left-wing groups took place. Proponents of the radical Left set fire to Catholic and right-wing institutions. In early March, the liberal Defensor de Granada called for the February elections to be annulled. On March 9, members of the Falange attacked Granada; they disrupted classes in the university medical school, skirmished with anti-fascist protesters, and fired on a crowd of workers. Several citizens were wounded. The local trade union retaliated by calling a general strike. Citizens burned the Falange headquarters, the offices of the conservative daily El Ideal, the headquarters of the local Catholic party, a theater, and two cafés. Three weeks later the Spanish Cortes annulled the Granada elections.
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br />   Throughout the country, tensions deepened. The brittle left-wing coalition began to splinter, while right-wing groups banded together, fueled by their mutual dread of a communist revolution. Unwilling to make even a show of backing a government in which they no longer believed, mainstream conservative leaders looked for the first time with interest to José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s extreme-right Falange party. Droves of young Catholics who had supported Gil Robles the previous year shifted their allegiance to the Falange, with its promise of a swift and violent resolution to the current crisis. In Madrid, poet Pedro Salinas noted that Spain was becoming “more poisoned and more hate-filled every day.”

  As always, Lorca sided with the Left. He backed Manuel Azaña, whom he had known for years, and he subscribed to traditionally liberal views on most issues. One week after the elections he joined several dozen writers and intellectuals in declaring their support for a manifesto by the Universal Union for Peace, calling for a resolution of the Italian-Ethiopian conflict, a revitalization of the Geneva peace efforts, and an end to violence in general. Azaña was one of the manifesto’s principal signatories.

  “As an observer of life,” Lorca believed, “the artist cannot remain insensitive to the social question.” Accordingly, he lent his celebrity and his work to causes he deemed worthy. He read his Gypsy Ballads at a benefit for the Children’s Aid Association, a library for poor children that he had helped to found in Madrid; at the benefit he allowed a copy of his book to be auctioned on behalf of the association. He also read his ballads at a left-wing gathering in support of Brazilian anti-fascists; he signed documents protesting against repression in Latin America and Portugal; and he signed a public letter protesting the arrest, in January, of Spanish poet Miguel Hernández, who was accused of conspiracy against the government.