His theatrical personality drove itself “like a wedge into [Madrid’s] artistic world,” Mora Guarnido recalled. For the first time, Lorca grasped the seductive power of his own charm. He impressed several of the city’s most illustrious artists. Playwright and director Gregorio Martínez Sierra took note of the talented youngster from Granada. The Catalan dramatist Eduardo Marquina talked of arranging a public reading of Lorca’s work. Juan Ramón Jiménez, the great poet from Andalusia, welcomed Lorca into his apartment, listened to his poems, and invited him to come back “so we can read and play the piano,” an exuberant Lorca reported afterward to his parents.
He was thrilled by his encounter with Jiménez. The celebrated poet had been seated in a “stupendous” armchair when Lorca arrived at his home bearing a sheaf of poems and a letter of introduction from Fernando de los Ríos. In Impressions and Landscapes, Lorca had described Jiménez as a “great poet of mist.” The image befitted the poet’s intensely lyrical verse as well as Jiménez himself, a moody, taciturn man plagued by spells of depression, who so craved silence that he once tried to insulate his office walls with sacking and esparto grass so that he could work undisturbed. Strikingly handsome, with brooding eyes, a black mustache and goatee, and a long, angular face that El Greco might have painted, he was introspective, self-absorbed, and petulant. His enemies called him Narcissus—a term Jiménez deemed accurate. On the afternoon of his meeting with Lorca he wore a black dressing gown trimmed in silver. Lorca sat on a nearby sofa and fixed an ecstatic gaze on the older man. Jiménez stared back at his dark-haired, “snub-nosed” guest.
The two talked about literature. To Lorca’s delight, “Juan Ramón”—as most called him—gossiped about Madrid’s literary elite and heaped scorn on the city’s “young little poets,” from whose ranks Lorca understood himself to be excluded. He was in awe of the older poet. Then thirty-seven, Jiménez was one of Spain’s two reigning poets in the first years of the twentieth century; the other was Machado. At nineteen, Jiménez had published his first poetry collections, a pair of flamboyantly modernista works. He later turned his back on these volumes and sought to hone his style, progressively shedding the effusive, sentimental language of his earlier work in favor of a more concise, hermetic idiom stripped of ornament, a poetry Jiménez christened “naked verse.” A perfectionist, he labored daily, arduously, to create his obra; he spoke of poetry as his “discipline and oasis,” his “caprice and crucible.” By 1916 he had published fifteen books; he would produce four more by 1923. He agonized over each one, seeking the most beautiful typeface and cover, the perfect paper. It grieved him to publish his work. “The moment I receive the first printed copy … I tear off the cover and begin all over again,” he confessed. “Letting go of a book is always, for me, a provisional solution, reached on a day of weakness.” Lorca would adopt the same attitude.
As a member of the Generation of ’98, Jiménez aspired to “remake” Spain by remaking the Spanish language, specifically, by reshaping its poetry—eliminating the rhetoric of imperial Spain, the hollow idioms of politics, and introducing a quieter, more intimate and memorable form of discourse. He believed, with Shelley, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and he devoted much of his life to the creation of a “political poetics,” an “ethical aesthetics”—an art that, while not explicitly political, nonetheless wields a subtle and profound effect on public sensibility.
In this, as in his conviction that poetry is a spiritual rather than a materialistic pursuit, and in his constant efforts to renew traditional forms of Spanish poetry—ballad, folk song, sonnet—Jiménez was to prove an exemplary teacher to Lorca. He taught through his poems, as welclass="underline" works suffused with the lore and landscape of his native Andalusia, lines that chart Juan Ramón’s love of nature and music, and his intense, prodigious, morbid fascination with death.
That afternoon, Lorca read a handful of his own poems to Jiménez. The older poet expressed admiration for the works. He asked Lorca to leave a few poems behind so that he could show them to his wife, Zenobia. Afterward, Jiménez wrote to Fernando de los Ríos: “Your poet came, and he made an excellent impression on me. He seems to possess a very fine temperament and what I judge to be the essential virtue in art: enthusiasm. He read me some very beautiful compositions. A little long, perhaps, but concision will come on its own. I hope I don’t lose sight of him.”
A second letter from de los Ríos introduced Lorca to Alberto Jiménez Fraud, director of the Residencia de Estudiantes, a prestigious men’s residence hall where de los Ríos had suggested Lorca try to live the following autumn. Admission to the Residencia was selective, and dependent chiefly on recommendations from prominent citizens.
Jiménez Fraud took an instant liking to Lorca. During their interview, the director asked him what his father did for a living. “My father is just rich,” Lorca shrugged. Charmed, Jiménez Fraud asked the “dreamy-eyed” poet if he would agree to give a reading of his work at the Residencia, as a kind of informal audition for admission to the institution. Lorca said yes, and days later gave a triumphant recital before an enthusiastic crowd that included several of his Granada friends—one of whom remarked that in the previous six months Lorca had “improved enormously.”
Lorca’s confidence soared. He had expected to conquer Madrid, but not so quickly, and certainly not so easily. “This business about how difficult it is to do well here isn’t true with me,” he bragged to his family. “I’m having real success.” He ridiculed Madrid’s “little writers” and brashly characterized the level of the city’s artistic life as “rock bottom.” “If I don’t come back here next year,” he threatened, “I’ll throw myself off the towers of the Alhambra.”
Flushed with achievement, he returned to Granada in the late spring of 1919. On June 15, ten days after his twenty-first birthday, he attended a tribute to Fernando de los Ríos in the Alhambra’s Generalife gardens. As a result of his support for local workers earlier in the year, de los Ríos had recently won election to the Spanish Parliament.
During the evening, Lorca and another local writer gave a poetry reading. Among their listeners was Gregorio Martínez Sierra, a small, impeccably dressed man in his late thirties, with a domed brow and black eyes. Although Martínez Sierra had met Lorca a few weeks earlier in Madrid and been impressed by him, there was something about Lorca’s recital that evening in the Generalife’s lush gardens that prompted him to pay closer attention. A writer, editor, publisher, and stage director, Martínez Sierra was in Granada with his theater company, the Teatro Eslava, to present a series of plays, among them Ibsen’s revolutionary drama A Doll’s House. The director had founded the Eslava three years earlier with the express intent of combating the trite bourgeois theater then so popular in Spain, and he had shaped the company’s repertoire accordingly. Typically the Eslava offered both classical and contemporary works, with an emphasis on poetic drama, especially the work of the Belgian symbolist, Maurice Maeterlinck.
As he listened to Lorca read, Martínez Sierra detected hints of Maeterlinck, particularly in Lorca’s allegorical poems about the Granadan landscape. The director may have recognized something of himself, too, in the passionate young Granadan. Like Lorca, Martínez Sierra had published his first book in his teens, a lyrical tome filled with nostalgic descriptions of nature. As a child he had staged amateur theatricals. As a teenager, he had dropped out of college, bored with its formalities. Throughout his adolescence he believed he was “destined to die young and live sadly.” But he survived, fell in love, married at eighteen, and embarked on a promising theatrical career with his wife, María, who collaborated with him on his plays. Sometime after founding the Eslava, Martínez Sierra left his wife for the company’s leading actress, an attractive brunette named Catalina Bárcena, who was with the director that evening in Granada.