His first book reveals far less about the author’s public travels through Spain than about his private obsessions: the destructive powers of time and death, the constraints of faith, the lure of sex. Recounting his visits to Castilian monasteries, Lorca imagines the frustrations of monks and nuns who have renounced the flesh, and he questions their sexual identity. He recoils at the sight of a pair of crudely masculine monks with coarse hands who press their lips to the Holy Sacrament, but at the same time he derides a male passenger in a carriage who sighs with “monklike effeminacy.” He celebrates the carnal. In a markedly bacchanalian episode whose imagery is rooted in both popular tradition and classical mythology, Lorca describes a group of village women bathing in a river while young men watch from some nearby underbrush. “Nature hopes for a gigantic copulation,” he writes. “The young men roll about among the flowers and the elder as they see a girl emerge from the water, naked, her breasts erect.”
Reviewing Impressions and Landscapes, Aureliano del Castillo noted that the book’s exuberant young author was only nineteen years old. The critic predicted that before two years had passed, the stylistic excesses and “tiny blemishes” that mar the volume “will have disappeared from his work. The cleansing of style, like the cleansing of color, is the final phase in the artist’s formation.” Despite its faults, Lorca’s first book announced his presence as a writer and introduced the issues that would dominate his subsequent work. To Lorca, the volume served as a tangible symbol of his conversion from musician to writer. He assumes a number of guises in the book: poet, teacher, social critic, playwright, and, above all, romantic. The narrator of Impressions and Landscapes is a melodramatic figure, a modern-day Quixote in search of the impossible. Oppressed by society and by the needs of his flesh, enamored of nature and beauty, haunted by the past, he seeks a spiritual and aesthetic absolute that persists in eluding him.
His primary mode is elegiac. He longs in vain for what is absent or lost, for what cannot be named. He is painfully aware that he will never fulfill his quest “for something spiritual or beautiful to ease our soul from its principal sorrow. We go bounding off in search of an impossible happiness … But we almost never find it.” The object of human desire changes constantly. Its essence, Lorca writes, “is immutable.”
Shortly after the book’s publication, Lorca took a signed copy of Impressions and Landscapes to Martin Domínguez Berrueta. The small, gray-haired man opened the volume and glanced inside. Suddenly he hurled the book at Lorca and ordered the teenager to leave his house. Two weeks later, Berrueta returned the volume to Lorca with a curt note explaining that although it grieved him to act with such “violence,” he did not wish to keep the book in his possession.
He had expected that Lorca would dedicate Impressions and Landscapes to him. But Lorca had instead consecrated the book to “the venerable memory” of another man, his former piano teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa. Berrueta was furious. His own name appeared just once in the book, in a brief afterword where Lorca paid tribute to his “dear teacher D. Martín D. Berrueta” and the “dear companions” who had accompanied him on his travels. Otherwise there was no mention of the professor whose expeditions had in large part enabled Lorca to write Impressions and Landscapes.
His traveling companions were shocked. They rebuked Lorca for his selfishness, reminding him that it wasn’t Berrueta who had accompanied Lorca on his journeys, but Lorca who had accompanied Berrueta. Worse, he had neglected to ask the professor to contribute a prologue to the book, as originally planned, and in a number of passages had thoughtlessly challenged Berrueta’s cherished ideas about art. Not long after the book’s publication, Lorca further snubbed the professor by evidently contributing to some derisive remarks about him in a local newspaper. These “domestic flatteries,” as Berrueta called them, were the final straw that drove him to sever all ties with Lorca.
Berrueta and his wife mourned the rupture, as did Lorca’s parents. But Lorca was impenitent. Berrueta was merely a critic of art, not an artist, and in his quest for greatness Lorca sought to identify himself with the latter. He wanted to follow in the footsteps not of a teacher but of a genuine creator—an artist like his former piano teacher, Segura Mesa, a disciple of Verdi, a dreamer who despite the failure of his work had never compromised or abandoned his dreams. That his choice might devastate Berrueta did not concern Lorca. He was blinded by ambition.
The two men never reconciled. Two years later, at age fifty-one, Martín Domínguez Berrueta died. As an adult Lorca took pains to express in public the debt he owed Berrueta. In private, he confided to the professor’s son that he regretted the events of 1918. “I’ll never forgive myself,” he said.
Besides its principal dedication to Antonio Segura Mesa, five chapters in Impressions and Landscapes bore dedications to Lorca’s friends. Among them were María Luisa Egea González, the young blonde from Granada with whom he remained infatuated, and his devoted admirer in Baeza, Lorenzo Martínez Fuset, who promptly launched a one-man campaign to promote the book. In Baeza, Martínez Fuset spoke about Lorca’s book to Antonio Machado, who expressed a desire to see the work. After scrutinizing the text, Machado advised Lorca, through Martínez Fuset, to “abandon his law studies, since being an artist entails separation, the breaking of Harmony, and divorce from the systematic.” The older poet also urged Lorca to prove himself outside his hometown. “One’s first successes ought to be measured in places where it’s harder to triumph.”
Lorca was quick to heed at least some of Machado’s advice. He took no university exams in the spring of 1918, and the following autumn dropped out of school completely. His breach with Berrueta had intensified his dislike of the university, and he saw no need to continue. Besides, he had other, more useful teachers. In addition to Machado, Miguel de Unamuno perused Impressions and Landscapes and, according to Lorca, published an insightful review of the book. “No one has taught me as much about my art as Unamuno did on that occasion,” Lorca said later of the review, whose existence has never been proven.
At the end of Impressions and Landscapes, Lorca listed his forthcoming works. They included a volume of poems, which he falsely claimed was “at press,” as well as a series of books “in preparation.” Some of these existed; some did not. Lorca drew no distinction between the two: to conceive of a work was to create it. “Whenever he found himself with a friend,” a colleague remembered, “he’d discover a new project, he’d invent his next tragedy.”
5
Debut
1918-20
On June 5, 1918, Lorca turned twenty. He could no longer fend off adulthood or, with it, the possibility of death. Three days after his birthday he learned that one of his childhood friends, a young man his age, had died. That evening Lorca wrote a poem in his friend’s memory. All summer long he thought about death, a process fueled in part by contemporary events. By fall, the worst flu epidemic in history had struck Europe, afflicting 150,000 people in Spain alone. Within a year the so-called Spanish flu had claimed twenty million victims worldwide. In France, the disease assailed a country already ravaged by four years of trench warfare—a murderous deadlock that killed, maimed, or wounded nearly half of those who took part in it. “One eats, one drinks beside the dead, one steps in the midst of the dying, one laughs and one sings in the company of corpses,” wrote French surgeon Georges Duhamel in the midst of the Battle of Verdun, which lasted ten months and claimed more than 700,000 lives.