LIVING THE LIFE OF LORCA: Dealing with the Subject of the Biography, his Influence on the Biographer and Reader
(Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life, by Ian Gibson, 551 pages, Pantheon. $29.95)
On June 5, 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, Soto de Roma (the Estate of the Christian Girl) in the heart of the region called La Vega, near Granada, Federico Garcia Lorca was born. On June 11, he was baptised Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesus. From the hard facts and rich landscape surrounding his birthplace, Ian Gibson hatches the life of Lorca. With elegant clarity and detail, he glosses the local history, society, and ancestry in a region that overseers for the Wellingtons had managed since the Peninsular War. Gibson is careful to separate the evidence of real events in Federico's childhood from the legends that developed around him.
“It has been said that a few months after his birth Federico underwent a serious illness which prevented him from walking until he was four. This story probably derived from the poet himself.” What Ian Gibson does propose is that “the poet had extremely flat feet and that his left leg was marginally shorter than the other, defects no doubt congenital, which lent to his gait a swaying motion. In an early poem, Lorca complains of his ‘clumsy walk.’”
We are safe in the guiding hands of a biographer, not left to follow the poet and his ignus fatuus over a shifting quagmire of personal recollection.
But what should a person do with what they don't like in their life? Gibson’s description gives us the impression of a lumpy, low-to-the-ground peasant. Once Lorca saw his lug-eared lopsidedness, why not—instead of a pedestrian flaw—choose the spell of a monstrous illness to account for it?
At least Gibson doesn’t clout Lorca for altering his history to suit his appearance; he is, after all, Lorca’s biographer, not his brother.
Francisco Lorca honours Federico as the authentic fountain of song for the land from which he sprang, but raking over the same ground of childhood memory in his memoir, the younger brother tut-tuts Federico for being such a fabricator—a poet who could even get the colour of his flowers wrong, claiming to “turn yellow...like the rosemary”—when he should have known from his Gongora “rosemary/are blue.”
“How could he make such a mistake?”
There are others.
In a 1934 interview, Federico was striving to recall an incident from 1906 on their farm/estate at Daimuz—an occasion which touched his sensibility deeply. In the furrow behind a plough, one of the new Bravant models introduced at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, a Roman mosaic was turned over. The poet failed to recall what was inscribed on it. “I can’t remember, but for some reason I think of the shepherds Daphnis and Chloe. So,” said Lorca anyway, “the first artistic wonder I ever felt was connected with the earth.”
On his brother’s report of that particular discovery Francisco Lorca waxes skeptical. Roman remains were unearthed at Daragolya, a nearby estate, but Francisco hastens to explain: “What mattered to the poet was not the accuracy of the story, but the historical tradition of those lands and Federico's awareness of it.”
Skipping a mile or two of reality is less important than the impression things have on a poet.
Mario Hernandez goes along with this. The first thing he observes for his introduction to In the Green Morning, Franciso's memoir published by New Directions, is that Federico switched the birthplace of his brother Francisco from nearby Fuente Vaqueros in 1902 to the “nobler-sounding” Daimuz. The Hernandez diagnosis: “Federico was carried away by his imagination”; quoting from the poet's letters, Hernandez adds that the poet had “no apparent vocation, but his emotion about things.” Francisco’s future, by comparison, was to be tangible and solid.
Heed the poetry, but pay no attention to the man. Lorca’s adoration of a drama was notorious among his family and associates.
"The last fragment of theatre Federico would write was titled “The Dreams of My Cousin Aurelia.” Both Gibson and Francisco Lorca describe the poet’s visits to his cousin Aurelia, who was terrified of lightning.
The original scenario unfolds as follows. Aurelia used to lock herself into a candlelit room, away from thunder and the reek of ozone, go into convulsions, exclaim, “Just look at me, I'm dying.” Federico would arrive faithfully to do so.
Their cousin and the lightning became so synonymous that when a tempest was imminent, the cry would go out, “Federico is coming.” Finally, Federico was locked outside with the other bolts of lightning.
For the family, this became one of las cosas de Federico: Federico’s things.
Francisco tells how, on another occasion, when he was walking with his brother through some poplar trees, halfway between Valderrubio and Fuente Vaqueros, the sky darkened. The air pressure dropped, a clap of thunder came along with an unsaddled runaway horse. Then another clap of thunder and the typical odour of ozone. Suddenly, Federico came running to the younger (gullible?) Paquito, claiming a spark had scorched his cheek. Francisco traces the event to a Lorca poem where “the sky was slamming its doors/ to the rough murmuring of the wood/ and the lights were screaming.” To end the episode, Francisco adds, “As for the scar on the cheek, the scar left by the kiss of lightning, it is borne by one of the characters in his theater.”
Very shortly after childhood and Federico’s early years in Granada (the point at which Gibson’s life of Lorca explodes), the brother’s memoir turns to the works and away from the embarrassments of the grown man.
The impression of the poet as unreliable witness to his own life could rest with Dr. Francisco, the brother, but Ian Gibson, the biographer, persists in the digging at Daimuz. He discovers that the poet’s memory seems not to have played him false because a few years after Francisco’s death, a Roman farmhouse came to light under the fertile soil of Daimuz. Numerous coins—almost all from the period of Constantine, and a large quantity of Mosaics. It is almost certain then, that in evoking his first experience of “artistic wonder,” the poet was remembering a true event and that, in a thrilling, unexpected way the ancient history of Andalucía had suddenly been made palpable to him.
The biographer, unlike the brother, has his advantage of hindsight and an independent view. Like a translator for whom the original text is unchangeably set, the biographer’s subject is fixed in a specific time. That period of time can be gone back to again and again. As more accurate information is discovered, it can be added to the store—just as an improved rendition can be substituted for a weak draft of a translation.
Time tells, eventually, and for those who have a role to play in the life they are remembering, memory can be the very imp of their memoir.
In 1906, Francisco was four; Federico, eight. Having no documentation for or against Federico’s version, Francisco resorts to memory, pitting his academically trained authority against his brother’s. However, Federico’s feats of recollection were driven not by a poltergeist, but a virile demon for detail, well-recognized within the family.
Francisco Lorca and Ian Gibson recount how in later life Federico was able to describe to his mother, detail for detail, the room in which the shepherd Cobos, friend and counsellor to the family, had died and was laid out—to such a degree of accuracy that the mother, Vicenta Lorca, exclaimed, “What a memory God has given you.”
Perhaps, as is the case with families, there was a division of powers regarding authority on memory, and the tradition became, for paranormal memories—consult Federico, and for ordinary explainable things—Francisco.
Whichever way, memory is the angel and the imp of biography and creative work.
Reaching back to the edge of consciousness, it was to be Lorca’s major source for his material, and the main item of luggage he committed his scripts and verses to. Gibson duly notes those occasions on his travels in Cuba and the United States when Lorca drew on drafts of his writing stored in his head.
Poured into his jug-ears, too, was the whole grain of his language and subject matter from his childhood in La Vega. Lorca acknowledges his debt to the region, to people like his cousin Aurelia and her family, whose instruction for boiling an egg was to put it in “when the water laughs.” And to his wet nurse Dolores Cuesta and those like her who nourished the sons and daughters of rich children with folk songs and poetry. Often Federico would reverse roles with his brother, who lived his life in opposition to a legend, and the exaggerator would remind people that the speech in his plays was not an overblown construction of his own (like Synge’s peasants, as Gibson points out, in Playboy of the Western World), but a realistic representation of the naturally figurative way people talked in the La Vega.
A gift and a curse, Lorca would eventually try to exorcize his image-ridden language by trying to write a play with speech that contained no metaphors. One I can appreciate having been brought up in a home of hyperbole myself.
However, how did they describe Federico and his thing when he was at home? In Granada, his enemies would cage him in a phrase—el maricón de la pajarita, the fairy with the bow tie.
Even Paquito, that imponderable gentleman, liked to tag his brother. When Federico was being packed off in 1919 to the Resi (Residencia de Estudiantes) in Madrid, Francisco’s job was to copy his brother’s name onto the labels of his shirts and collars. Using indelible Chinese ink, he added couplets with soppy rhymes, pairing girls and flowers so that “Aeolia rhymed with magnolia, dahlia rhymed with Natalia. I have never seen Federico so furious,” Francisco goes on. “My contributions had to be carefully cut away. With infinite patience and, I think, a smile of complicity, my mother cleverly mended the holes where the offending couplets had been.”
In fun or fury Lorca could be mocked by foe, family or friend.
Word of mouth (el que-dirán—the what-will-they-say) is perforce the number one witness for Ian Gibson because the “dustcart” into which Thomas Sergeant Perry, an early American critic, says “the biographer shovels diaries, reminiscences, old letters...the garbage from which the reader constructs a biography”—trundles up three-quarters empty.
Family, friends and fellow artists have been zealously tidy with the documented refuse of their relationship with Lorca.
