Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Pedro Salinas worried that Lorca was trying to emulate Rafael Alberti, and that by doing so he risked falling into “the social trap” and compromising his art. Salinas criticized Lorca’s unfinished play The Dream of Life as a “scorchingly communist drama.” But Lorca was no Alberti, and his play, although set in the midst of a political revolution and sensitive to the social ramifications of political strife, was primarily concerned with more basic aspects of the human condition, and with aesthetic questions that had perplexed Lorca throughout his career: the nature of reality and artifice, the role of dreams, the artist’s responsibility to society. The Asturian revolution weighed heavily on Lorca, but he was not so naive as to think he could redress such problems through literature. He did not write activist poems or theater, as Alberti did. He did not subscribe to dogma. He refused to join a political party, and he was selective in signing petitions.

  His chief concern was human rights, not political rhetoric. He believed in the fundamental purity of art and in his own free will. He continued to fraternize with right-wing acquaintances, and was rumored to have spoken to José Antonio Primo de Rivera more than once that year. In 1935 he had laughingly told Rafael Martínez Nadal that he was not political, but rather “an anarchist-communist-libertarian, a pagan-Catholic, a traditionalist and monarchist who supports Don Duarte of Portugal.” When his friend Pura Ucelay asked him where he stood politically, Lorca answered, “Look, I greet some people like this”—he raised his hand in a Nazi salute—“and others like this”—he raised a clenched communist fist. “But to my friends, this” he cried, and held out his hand for Ucelay to shake.

  By 1936, though, even Lorca was forced to acknowledge that his work had political implications. In January a lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard in Tarragona, near Barcelona, filed an official complaint against his “Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard.” Lorca received a court citation. According to an account he later gave the press, he spoke to the prosecuting attorney and explained to him “in minute detail what the purpose of my ballad was, my concept of the Civil Guard, of poetry, of images, of surrealism, of literature, and of I don’t know how many other things.” The government dropped the charges. The attorney general of the Republic said afterward that in reviewing the case he had been reminded of the sixteenth-century Spanish judge who sent Cervantes to jail.

  In both action and words, Lorca continued to demand justice for people of all races and origins. During a hasty trip to San Sebastián in early March to give his lecture-recital on Gypsy Ballads, the same talk he had delivered in Barcelona the previous fall, he pointedly attacked the rich, proclaiming the true Gypsy “incapable of wrong, like many people who are dying of hunger right now because they won’t sell their age-old voice to the men who possess nothing but money, which is such a puny thing.” The packed auditorium gave Lorca a lengthy ovation.

  In April he attended a concert in Madrid by the African-American singer Marian Anderson and spoke at a tribute to the poet Luis Cernuda on the occasion of the publication of Cernuda’s new book, Reality and Desire. Most of the Generation of ’27 were present. The celebration lasted until dawn. Months earlier Lorca had praised the spirit of friendship that marked his generation: “Envy and petty grievances are unheard of, and one poet will defend another.” At least two writers who attended Cernuda’s publication party, Concha Méndez and the Valencian Juan Gil-Albert, found the gathering touched with a sense of doom. Most of the participants were silent, tranquil, “as if in a dream,” Méndez recalled. By the end of the evening even Cernuda, who had tucked a sprightly white carnation into the lapel of his gray suit, seemed unwilling or unable to talk. The gathering dissolved into small groups, and these eventually vanished into the early morning air. Later that night Méndez dreamt that someone had stabbed Lorca to death.

  The violence in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain continued to escalate. The country was in a state of undeclared war. In March, members of the Falange had begun ostentatiously riding through the capital in squads of motorcars, wielding machine guns. As they drove through working-class neighborhoods they fired sporadically at alleged “Reds.” On March 13, they tried to murder a socialist member of parliament. The congressman survived, but his bodyguard died. A day later Prime Minister Azaña outlawed the Falange and jailed much of its leadership, including José Antonio Primo de Rivera. But the violence persisted. Both extreme right and extreme left groups roamed Madrid, firing at random targets. José Ortega y Gasset’s brother escaped a Falangist bomb attack on his home in early April. Days later a republican judge was shot dead, apparently in retribution for having sentenced a member of the Falange to life in prison. The following week, April 13, a member of the Civil Guard was shot and killed during a military parade in Madrid. At his funeral two days later, right-wing extremists retaliated by killing twelve people. In early May, Falangists murdered a prominent republican official.

  At tertulias in his home, the Chilean diplomat Carlos Morla Lynch observed a deepening sense of fear and weariness. Guests rarely talked of anything but politics. Lorca turned up from time to time, but his visits were less frequent, and when he came, he tended to read from his New York poems, which he hoped to publish soon. Dark lines now rimmed his eyes and underscored his jowls. In photographs he looked subdued, even grim. But according to poet and critic Guillermo de Torre, who ran into him that spring, Lorca remained buoyant, upbeat, “richer than ever with life and with projects.” His Gypsy Ballads were about to go into a seventh edition; the print version of Blood Wedding had sold out within a matter of months; The Divan at Tamarit was scheduled for imminent publication. The poet and publisher José Bergamín planned to issue a multivolume edition of Lorca’s complete works for the theater, as well as Poet in New York. There was talk of a French production of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, and Lorca’s name had been sent to Manuel Azaña as a possible candidate to head a National Theater of Spain.

  Lorca used his renown to further the cause of human rights. In a long interview in the Madrid daily La Voz in early April, he noted that his latest play, The Dream of Life, addressed a pervasive “religious and socio-economic problem.” Invoking strains of communist rhetoric he launched into a brief diatribe against the inequities of the world economy:

  I see it clearly. Two men are walking along a riverbank. One is rich, the other poor. One has a full belly, the other pollutes the air with his yawns. The rich man says, “Oh, what a pretty boat I see on the water! Look, look sir, at the iris flowering on the shore.” And the poor man grumbles, “I’m hungry, I don’t see anything. I’m hungry, very hungry.” The day hunger disappears the world will see the greatest spiritual explosion humanity has ever known. Men will never ever be able to imagine the happiness that will erupt on the day of the Great Revolution.

  As if aware that he had suddenly gone too far, Lorca interrupted himself. “I’m speaking to you like a pure socialist, aren’t I?” But although he meant the statement as a disclaimer, it did little to blunt the radical nature of his remarks, which received widespread publicity. In addition to La Voz, three major Spanish dailies published excerpts from the interview.

  Lorca edged ever closer to active political engagement. But, true to his contradictory nature, he remained on the periphery of his country’s political life, an observer sometimes roused to the level of a participant. During the city’s May Day celebrations, he was spotted in Madrid, waving a red tie and shouting his support for the working classes. Crowds of socialist and communist youths paraded through the capital that day, carrying portraits of Lenin and Stalin, and singing the Internationale. In a short piece for the May 1 edition of the communist paper ¡Ayuda!, Lorca expressed his “great affection” for the workers of Spain and praised their quest “for a more just, more humane society.” A caption in ¡Ayuda! described Lorca as “always on the side of anything that represents social justice.” Later in the month he attended a massive banquet honoring three anti-fascist French writers who were visiting Spain. He declined to speak
at the event, however. “I’ve come here as a friend of my friends, not to make speeches on topics that don’t pertain to me,” he said.

  In early April, La Barraca traveled to Barcelona. Lorca did not go with them. During the past year he had grown increasingly more distant from the company, until his absence had at last been made “definitive” in late 1935, and a film director, Antonio Román, had been appointed to replace him. In its four years under Lorca’s leadership, La Barraca had presented nearly two hundred free performances of classic Spanish plays in towns, villages, and cities throughout the country. It grieved Lorca to part from the troupe. He asked the Barcelona paper La Noche to announce that as he was no longer affiliated with the company, he could not be held accountable for the quality of its performances in Barcelona that April.

  He plunged into his own theater work. Under the auspices of the Club Anfistora, Pura Ucelay wanted to premiere his so-called “legend of time,” Once Five Years Pass, in Madrid in July 1936. By coincidence, Lorca had completed the script almost five years earlier to the day, on August 19, 1931. Although he considered the play one of his “unproduceable” texts, along with The Audience and The Dream of Life, he consented to let Ucelay stage the work, and he took an active role in rehearsals. He told the amateur cast not to stress the melancholy quality of their lines, but instead to give them more life, “more ardor.” He sat in the rehearsal hall, his script on his knees, deleting lines that didn’t work. When he realized the protagonist’s death at the end of the play was lasting longer than it should, he rapidly crossed out the last eight lines of the script. He joked and bantered with actors as he worked, and generally enjoyed himself. But in June he abruptly canceled the production and told Ucelay he preferred to wait until fall to premiere his theatrical legend of time. He gave vague reasons for his decision: a trip to Granada, his planned visit to North and South America. Some thought he feared premiering the potentially controversial work in such politically troubled times.

  But he also knew that audiences were not ready for the play. Once Five Years Pass belonged to what Lorca described as his “impossible theater,” a term he had used publicly for the first time in 1933. By “impossible” he meant plays that were deliberately experimental and avant-garde, plays not likely to be embraced by the public, plays whose unorthodox nature and technical difficulties made them inherently “unperformable.” He regarded his “impossible theater”—Once Five Years Pass, The Audience, The Dream of Life—as his real work, his “true aim. In order to demonstrate a personality and earn respect I’ve written other things,” he conceded in the midst of rehearsals for Once Five Years Pass. By postponing the play, he explained to Ucelay, he was merely waiting for a more propitious time. When he had become a genuinely popular playwright, when his works were presented “simultaneously in three Madrid theaters,” as he hoped would happen in the fall of 1936, “then audiences will stick by me no matter what I do, and we can produce unproduceable works.”

  In the meantime he had started another play, a more commercially viable tragedy in the same vein as Blood Wedding and Yerma. In its May 29 “Rumors” section, the Heraldo de Madrid described Lorca’s new work as a “drama of Andalusian sexuality,” and noted that the playwright was on the verge of completing the script. He carried the text with him in his pocket throughout the spring and read it to friends as often as two or three times a day. When he finished a scene he sometimes rushed across the street from his family’s apartment to his friend Adolfo Salazar’s home, crying, “Not one drop of poetry! Reality! Pure realism!” When he completed a first draft he told Salazar that he was finally beginning his “true career as a dramatic poet.”

  He called the play The House of Bernarda Alba, with the subtitle “Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain.” He noted that the work should resemble “a photographic document.” In an effort to simulate the effect of photography he set the play in black and white, with the exception of one costume, a green dress worn briefly, and to great theatrical effect, in the third act. He had been interested in photography for more than a decade; in the 1920s he had attempted a short series of “photographic plays” in which characters are frozen in time, as if by a camera’s lens. In The House of Bernarda Alba he called for subtle gradations of hue—the action begins in an “extremely white room,” then moves to a “white room” and finally to the “four slightly bluish white walls” of an interior patio—gradations that create a quasi-cinematic effect. From the outset of his career, Lorca had striven to think of literature in terms of other media (engravings, ballads, legends, photography), and to write in one genre in terms of another, a way of challenging as well as reshaping the experience of poetry and theater. He found that the restrictions of one genre allowed for greater freedom in others. Because he was himself so accomplished an artist in a variety of disciplines, he was able to transcend aesthetic boundaries with credibility.

  He hoped to produce The House of Bernarda Alba in the fall of 1936, with Margarita Xirgu in the title role. He told Carlos Morla Lynch that he had based the drama on real-life characters and incidents in a village where he had lived as a child. The village was Asquerosa; his principal source of inspiration was a woman who had lived next door to his cousins, a widow whom he said was named “Doña Bernarda” and who ruled tyrannically over her five unmarried daughters. Lorca regarded her as a “mute and cold hell.” As a boy, he claimed, he had often seen Bernarda’s daughters pass through the village “like shadows, always silent and always dressed in black.” He had never spoken to the girls, but because his cousins shared a well with the family, he had sometimes spied on them.

  As always, he was embroidering reality. The widow’s actual name was Frasquita—not Bernarda—Alba, and in addition to her five daughters she had one son. The family lived across the street from the church, next door to Lorca’s first cousins, with whom they did share a well. In 1907 Lorca, his brother, Paco, and sister Concha had been confirmed in the village church together with Frasquita Alba’s six offspring and nearly two hundred other village children. Frasquita herself had died in 1924, but Lorca had no qualms about using her surname, Alba (“dawn”), in his play, despite pleas from his mother that he “change her last name, too, change it!” He borrowed additional village names, including those of three of Frasquita’s daughters, for most of the remaining characters in his all-female cast, and he fleshed out his “drama of women” with the homely details of everyday village life.

  Although he finished a draft of The House of Bernarda Alba on June 19, 1936, he told a friend that he intended to rewrite, or at least modify, the second and third acts. By way of defending his script, he repeated what he had said the previous fall: “The only topics that interest me for the theater are social and sexual ones.” The House of Bernarda Alba addresses both. Set in an arid Spanish village at the height of summer, the drama takes place entirely inside the house of Bernarda Alba, whose second husband has just been buried as the play begins. Bernarda’s first—and last—word onstage is “Silence!” A despot enslaved by the cruel conventions and petty gossip of village life, she informs her five unmarried daughters that for the next eight years they will remain in mourning for their father, dressed in black, confined to their home like nuns in a cloister. “In the meantime, you can begin embroidering your trousseaux,” she instructs.

  Her daughters Martirio and Adela both pine after a village bachelor, Pepe el Romano, who though never seen onstage fills the claustrophobic air of Bernarda’s house with his implicit masculine presence. By village tradition, Pepe is reduced to seeking the hand of Bernarda’s oldest daughter, Angustias, an ungainly spinster of thirty-nine who has inherited her late father’s wealth. As they embroider sheets for her trousseau, her sisters gossip about Angustias and discuss the charms of her twenty-five-year-old fiancé. In time it becomes clear that Adela has had secret nighttime liaisons with Pepe—has in fact made love to him. When word arrives, in Act 2, that a village girl who has had an illegitimate child is about to be stoned by her
neighbors, it is Adela who cries for the young woman’s life to be spared, while Bernarda declares, “Yes, let them bring olive sticks and hoe handles, let them all come and kill her.”

  In the play’s final act Adela decides to flee her mother’s prison and run off with Pepe. “With the whole village against me, burning me with their fiery fingers, persecuted by people who say they are decent, and in front of all of them I’ll put on the crown of thorns worn by every mistress of a married man.” Her escape is short-lived. Her sister Martirio alerts Bernarda to Adela’s plans; Bernarda goes off with a shotgun to kill Pepe. Thinking her lover dead, Adela hangs herself. Bernarda returns, having failed to murder Pepe (“It was my fault. A woman can’t aim”), and learns of her daughter’s suicide. She briefly loses control—her only lapse in the drama—then quickly regains her composure and orders Adela’s body cut down from the rafters and carried to her room and dressed “as if she were a maiden.” Propriety must reign; appearances are to be preserved. “I want no weeping,” Bernarda tells her four remaining daughters. “Death must be looked at face-to-face. Silence! (To one daughter.) Be quiet, I said! (To another daughter.) Tears, when you’re alone. We will all drown ourselves in a sea of mourning! She, the youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba, has died a virgin. Do you hear me? Silence, silence I said. Silence!”

  Despite Lorca’s claims to have achieved a state of “pure realism” with The House of Bernarda Alba (“Not one drop of poetry!”), the play is in fact a profoundly poetic instance of stylized realism. “I’ve eliminated a lot of things in this tragedy, a lot of easy songs, a lot of little ballads and lyrics,” Lorca told a group of friends who attended a private reading of the script that spring. “I want my theatrical work to have severity and simplicity.” Throughout his twenty years as a playwright he had gradually learned to strip his work of lyrical excess until at last, with The House of Bernarda Alba, he created a play steeped in poetic language and imagery but grounded in physical and emotional fact. Theater, he said, “is poetry that rises from the page and becomes human … Theater demands that the characters who appear onstage wear costumes of poetry and at the same time that their bones and blood be visible.”