In letter after letter, she talked of the extent to which she and her husband missed Lorca when he was away. His father, she informed him, was so desperate to hear from Lorca that he rarely left home until the morning post had arrived, and he spent a portion of every afternoon waiting outside his club in Granada for the second post. As for Vicenta, she so longed to see her son that she claimed she was capable of boarding an airplane—“forgetting that it could kill me”—and flying to Madrid.
Lorca shared their nostalgia. As winter approached and Madrid turned damp and cold, he felt increasingly homesick for Granada. He asked his family to send him more pictures of themselves. To Emilia Llanos, a fashionable granadina in her early thirties whom he had known for several years, he remarked that he remembered his hometown “as one should remember a sweetheart who has died and as one recalls a sunlit day of childhood.” His friendship with Llanos was another of Lorca’s chaste attachments to women, founded largely on a shared passion for literature and art. He asked Llanos if the leaves had fallen yet in Granada. “Here in Madrid, the trees are already skeletal and cold. On only a few does a little leaf remain, and it moves in the sad wind like a golden butterfly.” He too was sad. “In my soul I feel the bitterness of being bereft of love. I know this gloom will pass … but the telltale sign remains forever!”
He was conscious of time passing, of another generation coming to replace his own. In November one of his oldest friends, Manolo Ángeles Ortiz, a former member of the Rinconcillo who now lived in Madrid with his wife, Paquita, became the father of an infant daughter. Throughout Paquita’s pregnancy, Lorca doted on the couple. One day he took Paquita to the park to “look at pretty things so that your baby will notice them, too.” Asked to be the child’s godfather, he accepted with enthusiasm, and at her baptism gravely promised to instruct tiny Isabel Clara Angeles Ortiz in the Christian doctrine.
His own children, he said, were his poems, “and I love them very much.” But although he had written more than a hundred poems by early 1921, he had published fewer than twelve. He was shy about his verse, so much so that Juan Ramón Jiménez took it upon himself to arrange for the publication of several of Lorca’s poems in two prestigious literary journals. “He is so timid that in spite of what I’ve said to encourage him, he hasn’t dared send the poems directly himself,” Jiménez told the editor of one of the journals. Jiménez regarded Lorca as one of the country’s “true” young writers.
Others also urged him to publish. Playwright Eduardo Marquina and director Gregorio Martínez Sierra each talked of bringing out a collection of Lorca’s verse. Lorca spoke brightly to his parents about the prospect of a book, but at heart he was ambivalent about publication. His mother was keen for him to bring out a book and wrote, “You mustn’t content yourself with the admiration of a few. That isn’t enough. Many, many people must know of you—everyone.” Lorca was skeptical. He had rushed into publication with Impressions and Landscapes and then regretted it; shortly after the book’s release he told a friend that when it came to publication, no writer should compromise his ideals. The disastrous premiere of The Butterfly’s Evil Spell had only confirmed his thinking—and taught him, besides, to loathe what a friend called “the precarious publicity of newspapers and magazines.” To his parents Lorca acknowledged that “irresponsibility and impetuosity” were lethal to fine art.
He was eager to do justice to his poetry, which at this stage of his career meant more to him than either his prose or his plays. Asked once why he insisted on reading his poems aloud, he slapped his hand against his chest as though pressing a sheaf of verse to his heart and answered, “To defend them.” He was fundamentally an oral poet who preferred the direct response of a live audience to the filtered rewards of publication. On those rare occasions when he did surrender a poem to a magazine or journal, he did so “with a sense of rupture and a secret repugnance, like a mother who sends her son off to the army,” remembered José Mora Guarnido. Lorca was more succinct. “I publish only for my friends,” he said.
In 1921 it was a friend who ultimately persuaded Lorca—“almost by force”—to publish his poems in book form. Gabriel García Maroto, then twenty-nine, was an enterprising painter and publisher who owned a small print shop in Madrid. Maroto was known for the elegance of his publications, a fact that pleased Lorca, who told his parents he had no intention of issuing an “ugly” edition. “I want the book to come out to my liking, since I’m its father.” His own father agreed to fund the costs of publication. Maroto offered to let Lorca edit the book himself—a condition Jiménez had advised him to seek, for by doing so he could control both its content and design.
Lorca asked his brother, Paco, to help him select and assemble a collection of poems from the mass of verse he had written since 1917. He found the selection process itself tortuous because, as he told his parents, “you’re confronting your own work and every line becomes an immense wave that engulfs you.” He worked fastidiously, rejecting poems with too many literary allusions and toiling over revisions to those that remained. As he reread his work and corrected proofs, he felt increasingly like a poet, “a pure poet, an exquisite artist, which is what one ought to be.” Unwilling to settle for “cheap popularity and the applause of the ignorant,” he viewed himself as a lone crusader for lyrical purity. “The fight I must wage is enormous, for on the one hand I have before me the old school, and on the other I have the new school. And here I am, from the newest school, chopping and changing old rhythms and hackneyed ideas.”
His mother offered her customary support. “As far as the public is concerned, you must be cold-blooded,” she warned, “because unfortunately people’s tastes are old-fashioned, and therefore you moderns will have to fight hard until you prevail.” She assured Lorca that she would pray to the Virgin “to help you and to make everything turn out well, and to grant you peace of mind, and not to let you suffer for any reason.”
Throughout the first months of 1921, Lorca worked on his book. He devoted much of his spare time to helping Juan Ramón Jiménez organize an upcoming visit to Spain by the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, whose work Lorca had long admired. It was soon apparent to both his parents that Lorca was neglecting his studies. When at the last minute Tagore’s visit was canceled, his mother scolded him for having let the project distract him from his real work: “Federico, don’t waste time, for these are the best years of your life.” “Be more like your brother, who works hard, and you see how he is rewarded. Give each thing its due, but no more than that.” Vicenta begged Lorca to publish his book and finish his degree, if only to please his father, for “if he’s happy, then I am too.” She urged him not to waste time with friends.
But it was useless. Despite assurances that he socialized only on Sundays, when he and his friends went to the park (“I’m turning blacker than a genuine Angolan”), Lorca in fact squandered hours with his companions. He had a new roommate at the Residencia that semester, an impish teenager named Pepín Bello, who cared as little, if not less, for school as Lorca did. Bello seldom passed an exam and in time abandoned his studies altogether, dismissing his chosen field of medicine as nothing but “dissection and putrefaction.” He preferred to carouse with friends and dabble in nonsense. Blond and boyishly lean, he was, according to a friend, “a mischievous genius … happy, electric, a maker-inventor of a thousand silly remarks and situations.”
He and Lorca became firm friends. Years later Bello recalled their days together at the Residencia as having been tinged with a “special aura.” “You’re my best friend, the one I love most,” he told Federico, whom he nicknamed “cherry,” a probable pun on “chéri.” Like others, he was dazzled by Lorca’s ingenuity. At night Lorca sometimes sat in their room and read plays by Lope de Vega to friends, or he gave impromptu sketches of contemporary authors. Occasionally Bello would come home to find his roommate so absorbed in writing or revising a poem that he failed to notice his presence, even when Pepín spoke to him. Lorca went through virtual “labor pains” in order to write, Bello remembered. No poem was complete until he had shaped it to perfection.