Federico Garcia Lorca

From Philosopedia

García Lorca, Federico (5 June 1898 - 19 August 1936)

Garcia Lorca was born in Fuente Vasqueros, Granada, Spain, the son of a father who was a landowner and a mother who was a teacher.

He received his B.A. from the University of Granada, where he studied philosophy and law.

Internationally recognized as one of Spain’s most prominent lyric poets and dramatists, García Lorca who was murdered by Spanish fascist forces has become a legendary tragic hero.

His Ode to Walt Whitman and an unfinished The Destruction of Sodom revealed his contradictions concerning homosexuality.

l to r: Salvador Dali, Jose Moreno Villa, Luis Bunuel, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jose Antonio

Garcia Lorca’s sexual rejection by painter Salvador Dalí and his friendship with filmmaker Luis Buñuel have been well documented, including a stormy and one-sided relationship with Emilio Aladrén Peroja, a young sculptor, which led to his “mysterious emotional crisis” that inspired his family to arrange for him to move to New York City in 1927.

In 1919-1920, he wrote El maleficio de la mariposa, his first play. It was in verse and was about a cockroach's and a butterfly's impossible love affair. An unappreciative audience, laughing at its supporting cast of other insects, led to its being performed only four times. Garcia Lorca later would claim that Mariana Pineda (with stage settings by Dali) in 1927 was his first play.

In Spain, according to Francisco Soto of New York’s College of Staten Island, Lorca was forced to censure and speak only indirectly of homosexual desire. Even after his death, "his homosexuality remained severely closeted in Spain” and continued to be overlooked by many Spanish critics. Soto added,

Although many reasons have been cited for Lorca’s assassination (among them, his liberalism, his rebellion against traditional values, his communist leanings), it is evident that his homosexuality was not absent from the motives of those fascists loyal to Francisco Franco, el caudillo, who tortured and killed him. Spain’s traditional inquisitorial Catholicism refused to permit the expression of a sexuality at variance with the dominant Christian morality. This intolerant environment well explains Lorca’s fears and deliberate concealment of his homosexuality both in his personal life and in his work.

Lorca in New York

Jaime Manrique, a bilingual novelist, poet, essayist, and translator and an associate professor in the MFA program in writing at Columbia University, has written a unique account of Lorca's life in New York City:

Lorca had been talking for a while about his desire to leave Spain and travel in Europe. He may have thought that in London, Berlin or Paris - which had large homosexual populations - he could find sexual comradeship. Instead, he chose New York, where his old professor and friend Fernando de los Ríos was scheduled to give a series of lectures at Columbia University.

Lorca wrote to a friend that he was going to New York because it was the worst of all places he could think of visiting. Of all the reasons he could have given, that was among the least convincing.

Like many avant-garde young intellectuals of his generation, Lorca was fascinated by black culture and by the movies. He was particularly captivated with the American comedian Buster Keaton and had written a short experimental prose dialogue titled "Buster Keaton's Stroll". (Unlike Charlie Chaplin, the other famous comedian of the time, Keaton eschewed sentimentality. Keaton's logic-defying physical comedy-escapes from boulders chasing him down rolling hills or buildings collapsing around him, leaving him unscathed-had an absurd quality that appealed to the surrealists.)

Black culture, on the other hand, represented the exotic, a potent sensuality, and jazz shared the improvisatory spirit of the automatic writing generated by some surrealists. The United States - where the cinema and jazz were born - represented the future.

Another lure of New York was that from there Lorca could travel to Cuba, which he had dreamed of visiting since his childhood. Whereas Lorca probably would not have gotten his parents to fund a trip to Cuba directly, he could travel to the island from New York, where he had the legitimate excuse of studying English at a prestigious American university.

It's also possible that Lorca chose New York because then, as now, it, too, was known as a mecca for homosexuals. Greenwich Village was already a gay neighborhood, and the speakeasies of Times Square were notorious hangouts for gays. Before traveling to New York, Lorca had read Walt Whitman's poetry in translation. "I will make divine magnetic lands, / With the love of comrades, / With the life-long love of comrades," Whitman wrote in "For You O Democracy." And, most boldly, in" I Dream'd in a Dream":

I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth, I dream'd that was the new city of Friends, Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest, It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words.

The American's poems of homosexual love had a profound impression on Lorca, who responded with the great "Ode to Walt Whitman", written during Lorca's months in the city:

Not for one moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies, nor your shoulders of corduroy worn out by the moon, nor your thighs of virginal Apollo, nor your voice like a pillar of ashes: ancient and beautiful as the mist, you moaned like a bird with the sex transfixed by a needle, enemy of the satyr, enemy of the vine, and lover of bodies under the rough cloth...

Lorca had arrived in New York as the Roaring Twenties were coming to an end. It was the age of jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, the first talkies and infamous gangsters. Prohibition was still in effect; the stock market crash of 1929 was imminent. Lorca enrolled at Columbia University and took up residence at Furnald Hall, then lost no time finding his way to Harlem, where he befriended the novelist Nella Larsen and attended church services and black music revues, including those at the Rockland Palace, Harlem's biggest dance hall, which hosted huge and lavish drag balls.

Deeply inspired by his identification with the suffering and rhythms of black life and music, which he felt echoed those of the Gypsies of Andalusia, Lorca wrote "The King of Harlem" only weeks after landing.

Perhaps unknowingly, in the blood rag[ing] beneath the skin of the black American, Lorca had also found a way to express his anger at the oppression he felt as a homosexual man.

On August 19, Lorca took a train to Montpelier, Vermont, to visit Philip Cummings, who lived in the town of Lake Eden. Cummings was a twenty-one year-old American student whom Lorca had met in Madrid at the Residencia de Estud-iantes, the school where he had also met Dalí and Buñuel. Many years later, when Philip Cummings was a seventy-five year-old widower and living alone, he told the Spanish poet Dionisio Cañas that he and Lorca had been not just friends but lovers.

According to Cummings, during his visit to Lake Eden, Lorca had written a memoir condemning Dalí and Buñuel, both of whom, Lorca felt, ridiculed his homosexuality and mocked his aesthetics. The famous and influential surrealist film Buñuel and Dalí made, Un Chien Andalou (Andalusian Dog), deeply upset Lorca. Back then, Andalusians were often referred to as los perros andaluces (Andalusian dogs), and Lorca thought the film title was an insulting allusion to him.

Before he left Vermont, Lorca gave Cummings a packet of private papers with the request that they be kept in a safe place. In 1961, Cummings opened the packet and found a note from Lorca begging him to destroy the papers if he hadn't heard from the poet in ten years. Cummings loyally complied. According to Cañas, Cummings did not elaborate further on the content of the writings, though he later expressed regret for burning Lorca's words.

In October the stock market crashed, precipitating the Great Depression. That same month, Lorca wrote to his parents that he was at work on an avant-garde play. Although no one knows exactly which plays Lorca saw in New York, we do know that he was keen to see as much as possible, particularly away from Broadway in the fringe theaters. In addition to the black musicals in Harlem, Lorca probably saw Chinese theater, modern works and foreign plays. At that time, American theater was beginning to address homosexual themes and to stage explicit plays, which were sometimes raided by the police. It has been suggested that the avant-garde work Lorca mentions to his parents is The Public, the most daring and openly homosexual of his plays.

In New York City, Lorca had begun to feel liberated enough to start addressing homosexuality in his writing. In this sense, New York was of monumental importance in his development. But despite the friends he made, the parties he attended (we know that he attended a party full of sailors given by the poet Hart Crane in Brooklyn), the great events he witnessed, the exciting jazz he listened to and the thrilling plays and movies he saw, it's safe to say that Lorca was often despondent while he was in New York.

The poem "Christmas on the Hudson", which he wrote in December 1929, speaks to that effect: "What matters is this: emptied space. Lonely world. River's mouth..../Oh, the keen blade of my love, oh, the cutting blade!"

Lorca had crossed the Atlantic to forget his disappointment in his failed relationships with men, but it's likely that he continued to love Emilio Aladrén Perojo, that Dalí's betrayal still stung, and that Cummings, back in the closet, had disappointed him. It was out of this anger and despair that Lorca wrote the poems of Poet in New York.

The following March, Lorca left for Cuba. The visit to New York had helped him find his voice. Though he had already written lasting but traditional works such as Gypsy Ballads, Lorca's reputation as an important and innovative author rests on the works he wrote during and after his trip to the United States. Poet in New York is one of the most influential books of poetry of the twentieth century. That liberating impulse reached its most powerful manifestation in the surrealist and revolutionary plays The Public and Once Five Years Pass.

Arriving in New York as a talented, accomplished yet conventional artist, Lorca left the city to become one of the major groundbreaking writers of the twentieth century. The marriage of tradition with modernism that began during his stay in New York reached full ripening a few years later, when he completed the splendid trilogy composed of Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba, and the sequence of poems that make up Sonnets of Dark Love. It is this late work, written after his transforming experience in Manhattan, that has assured Lorca his immortality.

Lorca's Poet in New York, according to editor Christopher Maurer, is

both a condemnation of modern urban civilisation—the spiritual emptiness epitomised by New York—and a dark cry of metaphysical loneliness.

Later, Maurer writes:

A recent critical account of Poet in New York identifies its three major themes as ‘social injustice, dark love and lost faith.’ Their common element is the alienation or ‘otherness’ just mentioned. The ‘social’ aspect of the book is easiest to grasp; Poet in New York condemns capitalist society and all that it seems to entail: an anthropocentric world view; the degradation of nature; indifference to suffering; the materialistic corruption of love and religion; and the alienation of social groups, particularly the blacks.

Lorca's Return to Spain

Lorca, according to Rick Klaus Theis, spent much of early 1936 preparing Divan Del Tamarit, a cycle of poems written in tribute to Granada's old Arab poets whom he had read in translation. In July, shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he went to vacation in Granada which had fallen to the fascists on the first day of the conflict. He was to become one of the 30,000 inhabitants of Granada to pay with their lives for their opposition to fascism and their contempt for fascist ideology.

Although he had no political affiliations Lorca was known to be a friend of left-wing intellectuals and an advocate of liberty. Apparently this was enough of an indictment for those Falangists who arrested him on August 16th. On or about August 18, 1936, Federico Garcia Lorca, along with a white-haired schoolmaster and two anarchist bullfighters, was driven to the village of Viznar at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There at dawn they were executed by a right-wing firing squad.

Although his remains are presumed to lie with those of hundreds of fellow victims in a shallow trench among the grove of olive trees adjacent to the Fuente Grande spring, the actual whereabouts of Lorca's grave are unknown to this day.

In 2004, many believed he was buried in a grave close to a mass grave in Viznar, where up to 3,000 are interred. He was thought to have been tortured and shot in his backside. Ian Gibson, an Irishman, was quoted as saying, "I think they beat him badly before they killed him. You can just imagine the visceral hatred that these people felt towards homosexuals and 'reds.' "

In 2008, Lorca's remains became at the center of a row over Spain's violent past. As one of 130,137 victims of Franco's repression, his and the others' graves are to be opened according to a court order. According to The Economist (27 September 2008),

Relatives of Dióscoro Galindo, a teacher, were among those who delivered the names to Judge Garzón. Galindo is thought to have been shot and buried with Lorca and two anarchist bullfighters in a grave on a hillside above his home city, Granada. Galindo’s relatives have spent five years campaigning for the grave to be dug up. They have always been opposed by Lorca’s family. But now, in a sign of a change of direction, the family has said it will not fight a court order to open the grave.

Lorca, a humanities humanist who was not a member of any organized religion, had a freethinkers’ outlook and was non-theistic.

Works

Plays

El Maleficio de la Mariposa (1920)

Mariana Pineda (1927)

La Zapatera Prodigiosa (1930)

Así que Pasen Cinco Años (1931)

El Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su Jardín (1933)

Bodas de Sangre (1933)

Yerma (1934)

Doña Rosita la Soltera (1935)

La Casa de Bernarda Alba (1936)

Books

Impresiones y Paisajes (1918)

Libro de Poemas (1921, poetry)

Canciones (1926, poetry)

Romancero Gitano (1928, poetry)

Poema del Cante Jondo (1931, poetry)

Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935, poetry)

Seis Poemas Galegos (1935, poetry)

Poeta en Nueva York (1940, poetry)

Divan del Tamarit (1940, poetry)

Suites (1983, poetry)

Sonetos del Amor Oscuro (1984, poetry)

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