For my parents
ANN SCARLETT PETTIGREW STAINTON
and
WILLIAM WHITFIELD STAINTON
I remember a certain thunderstorm when we were young. The two of us were walking from Valderrubio to Fuente Vaqueros, and all of a sudden, without our even noticing it, a storm came up. Halfway between the two villages, as we were going through the tall poplars that border the Cubillas, day turned to night. The fields were deserted and silent. A few heavy raindrops fell, and the wind began to rock the trees. Then, suddenly, there was a dry, formidable clap of thunder. An unsaddled runaway horse almost ran over us. Then came another more distant clap and the typical odor of ozone. Federico ran over to me, his face pallid, and told me that his cheek was burning. He said he had been touched by a spark of the lightning, which had, in fact, been blindingly bright. I drew near him, looked at his cheek, calmed him down, and we began our return in silence.
Francisco García Lorca,
In the Green Morning: Memories of Federico
Contents
Prologue
1 Fountains 1898-1905
2 New Worlds 1905-15
3 Young Spaniard 1915-16
4 Crucible 1917-18
5 Debut 1918-20
6 Portrait of Youth 1920-21
7 Falla 1921-23
8 Garden of Possibilities 1923-24
9 Dalí 1924-25
10 Incorrigible Poet 1926-27
11 Celebrity 1927
12 Madness of Breeze and Trill 1928
13 Rain from the Stars 1928-29
14 New World 1929-1930
15 Spanish America 1930
16 Audience 1930-31
17 Republic 1931
18 A People’s Theater 1931-32
19 Applause and Glory 1932-33
20 Voice of Love 1933
21 Our America 1933-34
22 Sad Breeze in the Olive Groves 1934
23 Revolution 1934-35
24 Theater of Poets 1935
25 To Enter into the Soul of the People 1935
26 The Dream of Life 1936
27 Fountain 1936
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Plate Section
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Notes
A Note on the Author
Prologue
1918
On the evening of March 17, 1918, four days before the German army launched its final assault on the Western Front, Federico García Lorca, a nineteen-year-old university student, stood before a small crowd of friends in the Arts Center of Granada, Spain. He was of average height and weight, with pitch-black hair and mournful eyes. A smattering of moles sprinkled his face. His clothes hung awkwardly from his shoulders.
He had agreed to read that night from his forthcoming book, Impressions and Landscapes, a prose account of his travels through Spain with one of his professors and a group of fellow students. It was his first public recital. For months he had been reading his poetry and prose to friends as they sat together in local cafés. He carried copies of his work on folded slips of paper in his pockets, even though he knew much of it by heart. But he had never given a formal reading of his work before now.
He was uncertain about the book—his first. In a prologue to the volume he described Impressions and Landscapes as “just one more flower in the poor garden of provincial literature.” He feared readers would laugh at the work or, worse, ignore it. Within a month of its publication he confessed to a friend that he thought his new book was “very bad.”
But that evening in the Arts Center, the audience applauded him warmly, and the following day, two local newspapers published favorable reviews of his recital. The Defensor de Granada announced that Impressions and Landscapes revealed “a most vigorous literary temperament.” The Noticiero Granadino predicted that the book was merely a “prologue” to greater work.
Two weeks later, Lorca received his first copy of the 264-page paperbound volume. He found the experience of publication oddly disappointing. Once a book “hits the streets it’s not mine anymore, it belongs to everyone,” he said. That evening, he marked the arrival of his book by drafting a five-page poem entitled “Vision,” a melancholy work about youth and love, one of dozens he would write that spring. Midway through the poem he asked, “What will become of my passion?” On the final page of the manuscript, almost as an afterthought, he wrote, “April 3, 1918. Night of my book.”
The Armistice was still seven months away. During its final offensives, between March and November of 1918, the German army sustained nearly one million casualties. On even a quiet day on the Western Front, hundreds of German and Allied soldiers lost their lives. A total of nine million men died in uniform during the four years of the Great War—one in eight of those who served. Another eighteen million were wounded. Throughout Europe, veterans of the war returned home blind, limbless, gassed, or as “scar throats”—men whose faces were so crudely disfigured by wounds that sometimes even their own families could not recognize them.
Lorca hated war. He hated the nationalistic sentiments that gave rise to it. “In a century of zeppelins and stupid deaths,” he told a friend in the spring of 1918, “I sob before my piano, dreaming in a Handelian mist, and I create verses very much my own, singing the same to Christ as to Buddha, to Muhammad, and to Pan.” Humanity was his only concern. “Why fight against the flesh when the terrifying problem of the spirit exists?”
At home, his family supported the Allies. Although Spain was officially neutral, people across the country took sides in the conflict according to their political and religious beliefs. Spanish newspapers were filled with accounts of the fighting. On June 5, 1918, Lorca’s twentieth birthday, the Defensor de Granada described a battle that had raged the previous night between German and French troops along the Aisne river, some sixty miles east of Paris. The paper also reported on the victims of “shell shock” who were allegedly subject to “barbarous” treatment in German military hospitals.
The carnage of World War I moved Lorca to denounce patriotism as “one of humanity’s greatest crimes.” In elementary school, he had been taught to love his country unreservedly, and to honor its military and political heroes. As he remembered it, his teacher, a gloomy man who struck his pupils’ hands with a cane whenever they misbehaved, talked repeatedly about the virtues of war and the glories of the Spanish Inquisition. Pounding his chest with his hand, he reminded Lorca and his classmates that Spain was their “second mother. As good sons, you must be willing to give her your last drop of blood.” In his teens, Lorca recoiled at the memory of these exchanges: “Instead of teaching us to love one another and help each other in our sorrow, they teach us the deplorable history of our countries, which are steeped in hatred and blood.”
Late at night, while his family slept, he composed long, prayerlike treatises calling for peace and love. Often he worked until morning. He had made his first strides “toward the good of literature,” as he phrased it, in 1916, at eighteen. Since then he had filled hundreds of pages with his haphazard scrawl. He wrote on whatever was handy—the margins of books, leftover voting ballots, his father’s calling cards, his brother’s high school drawings. Sometimes he drafted as many as five poems in a single night. At the end of some compositions, as though weighing their merit for publication, he jotted the word “Good.” He stored his work in a wooden box beneath his bed.
He thought of himself as a passionate “romantic,” an iconoclast who refused to conform to what society expected of him. He often neglected to comb his hair, and he wore unfashionably long cravats and patched trousers. He dreamt of becoming a writer. He persuaded his father, a wealthy landowner who was inherently skeptical about such things, to pay for the publication of his first book. At the end of Impressions and Landscapes, Lorca listed his forthcoming books. They included a poetry collection of “eulogies and songs,” a series of “mystical writings,” and a hybrid work about a lovesick monk, “Friar Antonio (Strange Poem).”