The Rinconcillo included two painters, a poet, and at least three local journalists. One of these, José Mora Guarnido, was in his late twenties when he met Federico, who was seventeen at the time. At their first encounter, Lorca wore a poorly knotted tie beneath a loose piqué collar and a black hat with a brim so flimsy it fluttered in the wind like “a huge butterfly wing,” Mora recalled. He noted Lorca’s dark face and thick eyebrows, lustrous eyes, the delicate mole above his lip, and his smile, which was “full of kindness.” Over glasses of sweet Málaga wine, the two talked about Granada and found they had much in common, including a shared contempt for artistic mediocrity and bad taste, two sins of which, in their view, the city’s painters and writers were eminently culpable. Mora Guarnido had long used his clout as a reporter to rail against pretension. In 1915, the year he met Lorca, he published, in collaboration with another Rinconcillo member, a slim work entitled The Book of Granada, in which he called for a rediscovery of the authentic “Granadan spirit.”
During their first meeting, Lorca sat at a piano and idly ran his fingers over the keyboard, producing, to Mora’s mind, a “distant murmur that echoed our words.” The journalist realized he was in the presence of an uncommon talent—one capable, perhaps, of fulfilling the aims he had set forth in his Book of Granada. He became one of Federico’s most devoted fans. Not long after they met, he inscribed a copy of his book for Lorca. “To my friend Federico Garcia Lorca,” Mora wrote, “admirable interpreter of Granada’s music, with all the fervor and admiration I can muster.”
Lorca received similar encouragement from another Rinconcillo journalist, Melchor Fernández Almagro, a portly, good-natured young man whose breadth of knowledge and prodigious memory prompted one friend to call him a “living archive.” A critic and historian as well as a reporter, “Melchorito,” as friends knew him, was five years older than Lorca. He was deeply impressed by Lorca’s musical gifts, and together with Mora Guarnido, regarded him as a likely means of reviving Granada’s ailing cultural life.
In their passion for Granada, both Fernández Almagro and Mora Guarnido echoed the late-nineteenth-century Granadan author Angel Ganivet, whose small book Granada the Beautiful had inspired readers since its publication in 1896. Ganivet had committed suicide in 1898, furthering the notion of that year as a “disaster” in Spain’s intellectual and political life. But his little book survived and became a clarion call to young men of Lorca’s age and outlook. In Granada the Beautiful, Ganivet sketched a portrait of a Granada “that could and ought to exist,” one where the old blended harmoniously with the new, and the local with the universal. He praised the city’s humble, diminutive beauty—a sentiment Lorca endorsed—but decried Granada’s ongoing “epidemic of expansion.” He believed such innovations as electric lights and broad streets threatened the city’s physical and spiritual well-being. Lorca shared this view, and later proclaimed Ganivet “the most illustrious granadino of the nineteenth century.”
Ganivet belonged to the “Generation of ’98,” a circle of writers, scholars, and theorists whose informal alliance was born of the disillusionment that followed Spain’s military defeat in 1898. In addition to Ganivet, the Generation included the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, the poet Antonio Machado, the essayists Azorín and Ramiro de Maeztu, and the novelist Pío Baroja. All were politically and intellectually progressive, with strong ties to Giner de los Ríos’s Free Teaching Institution in Madrid. All had spent their formative years in an atmosphere of pessimism and soul-searching sparked by the sense of despair and isolation that gripped Spain in the wake of the Spanish-American War. They came together as a generation to address what they viewed as the country’s degeneration and decadence, and in their creative writings and political and social polemics they both analyzed and criticized the country’s predicament. If Spain was to avoid slipping permanently into the realm of nations whose past grandeur outweighed their present and future achievement, something had to be done—spiritually as well as practically. Through their outspoken work, the Generation of ’98 sought to define the essence of the Spanish soul, and in doing so to help bring about the spiritual and ideological regeneration of individual Spaniards, and, in turn, of Spain itself. Convinced that this could be achieved, in part, by invoking the past as a model for the future, several members of the Generation turned to the seventeenth-century story of Don Quixote as a framework for Spain’s twentieth-century revitalization. Their ideals inspired Lorca and his friends in the Rinconcillo, who saw themselves as logical heirs to the older generation.
The young group launched a vigorous campaign to reform and revitalize Granada. They organized homages to overlooked artists from the city’s past. They talked of founding an avant-garde magazine, and openly scorned much of what passed for art in Granada. Despite his association with the institution, Lorca joined his Rinconcillo peers in attacking the Granada Arts Center, which the group perceived as a symbol of bourgeois pretension. Eventually, Lorca and two others from the Rinconcillo officially resigned from the Arts Center in protest against its provincial artistic “direction.”
Increasingly, he saw himself as a visionary waging a noble fight for artistic purity. Thanks to his friends in the Rinconcillo, who praised his expertise on the piano, he also viewed himself as a serious musician and composer with a budding future. But at the university he continued to flounder. Except for one or two sympathetic teachers, no one on the faculty paid much attention to him. At home, he drifted further away from his parents. Matters came to a head each spring when he invariably failed one of his university exams, and his father was forced to postpone the family’s annual seaside vacation in Málaga so that Federico could stay home and study.
In 1915, at the age of seventeen, Lorca took an art history course from Martín Domínguez Berrueta, a charismatic professor in his mid-forties whose passion for his subject caught Federico by surprise and prompted him to reassess his attitude toward school. Lorca quickly fell under the man’s spell. Like de los Ríos, Berrueta was one of a very few university professors who sought to breach the divide between faculty and students. He cultivated friendships with his pupils, invited them home to meet his wife and children, and took select groups of them on exhaustive trips through Spain. Devoted to art, he spoke enthusiastically to his classes about aesthetics. Lorca found him deeply inspiring. The two shared a romantic temperament and a sentimental view of the artist as a melancholy soul. Both loved Granada. Don Martin routinely took his students on outings to city monuments—a novel concept in Spanish education. At the same time, he recognized Granada’s shortcomings, and in words familiar to Federico from the Rinconcillo, he decried Granada’s “lazy atmosphere.”
A small, headstrong man with a spare frame and a long, angular face, Berrueta was the author of more than half a dozen books, among them Mysticism in Poetry and The Religious Problem from Within. Obsessed with his mission as a teacher, he concerned himself with all aspects of his students’ lives, including their love affairs. To those who challenged his ideas, he reacted furiously, his pointed gray beard flapping with indignation. His detractors thought him pompous and meddlesome. José Mora Guarnido despised Berrueta’s “cheap histrionics and vanity,” and tried to steer Lorca away from him. But Lorca dismissed his friend’s warnings.