Federico Garcia Lorca's New York
A city that stirred the Spanish literary icon’s imagination in profound ways
by Shankar Chaudhuri
Two summers ago, an exhibition commemorating Lorca’s time and works associated with New York took place in the New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan. It came and went and didn’t seem to make much of a flash beyond a tiny literary circle.
Yet for me the exhibit offered a splendid insight into the mind of modern Spain’s greatest poet and playwright. The letters, photographs, drawings and mementos along with the original manuscript of one of Lorca’s most famous works that made up the exhibit titled Back Tomorrow: Federico Garcia Lorca – Poet in New York offered a powerful rendition of how the brief time Lorca spent in New York had a profoundly indelible impact on his poetic vision and creativity.
Lorca’s time in New York – he spent a total of nine months in the city from June 1929 to March 1930 - originated at a time of personal crisis in his life. By 1929 his love affair with Emilio Aladren, the young sculptor, had failed and his latest round of work Gypsy Ballads had been roundly criticized as being too trite and conventional by no other than two of his closest avant-garde friends – Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel.
That Lorca who had not previously traveled outside Spain should choose to come to New York over London, Paris and other European cities is interesting. “New York seems horrible, that’s why I’m going,” Lorca wrote prior to his departure. For Lorca a city would be unreal if it were perfect. “I feel good here, better than in Paris, which I found a bit old and a bit rotten,” he wrote in a letter to his family soon after his arrival in New York on June 28, 1929.
New York simultaneously awed, fascinated, frightened and repulsed Lorca. In a reference to the vastness of the city, he remarked that his native Granada could easily fit into just three skyscrapers of Manhattan. In one trip to Coney Island during the Fourth of July celebration, he witnessed for the first time an urban crowd of about one million, indistinguishable from one another, huddling and jostling in one place. It produced a nightmarish vision for him. “I, poet without arms, lost/in the vomiting multitude,” he wrote, of his mind-numbing experience.
But it was New York’s diverse ethnic and marginalized segments that Lorca found an instant and strong affinity with. Having grown up in a multicultural Granada, Lorca claimed, enabled him to “understand those who are persecuted: the Gypsy, the black, the Jew…the Moor we all carry inside us.” At Columbia University where he had enrolled for English language classes, he developed close friendship with people as varied as a Mexican millionaire, a “Hindu” Ballerina and a Hawaiian pianist. He loved the pulse and vitality of Harlem where he found “human warmth and the shouts of children.”
It was also in Harlem that Lorca had his first-hand encounter with the spirituals, jazz and blues in the music clubs such as the Smalls Paradise that was at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance. Almost eight years before he came to New York, Lorca had already written Poem of the Deep Song as a tribute to the Gypsy musical tradition of Andalucía, sung in the tradition of cante jondo or deep songs that expressed intense and profound emotion of death, sorrow and loss. Now the contours of the musical genres he experienced in Harlem, especially that of jazz, gave Lorca an additional aesthetic sensibility, and contributed to his development of the concept of Duende, a heightened sense of emotion that can only be experienced, not explained. Duende has been a mysterious creative force that can emanate from the words of a poem or a song and can truly unite the performer and the listener. In most of the works he composed during his US tour – Poet in New York, the drama The Audience and the film script Trip to the Moon – he gave free rein to pure instinct as opposed to rational analysis rendering these works to permeate with the spirit of duende. By 1933, when he made his famous lecture “Theory and Play of the Duende,” he had cemented the connection between duende and the poet or a singer on a firm footing.
Lorca’s exploration of Duende may very well have influenced Miles Davis’s album Sketches of Spain (1960) that draws heavily upon Flamenco’s cante jondo. Likewise, more recently Enrique Morente, the Adalucian vocalist, paid his heartfelt tribute and gratitude to Lorca in his album named after the poet by fusing jazz and flamenco.
The centerpiece of the New York exhibit was the manuscript of Poet in New York. Lorca never lived to see its publication as he was brutally murdered by General Franco’s fascist elements in Granada shortly after he had left his manuscript with his publisher friend in Madrid in 1936. Although the work was finally published in 1940, the manuscript disappeared for decades. It was on display in the exhibit for the first time ever in the U.S., and it could not have been more fitting that New York was the venue for it.
If Lorca was initially intrigued by the duality of New York’s order and chaos – “the entire city is mathematically laid out in blocks, the only way to organize the chaos and motion,” he wrote in a letter on June 6, 1929 – it gradually gave in to a bleak and dark view of the city by the fall of 1929. He witnessed firsthand the stock market crash on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, that unleashed the Great Depression. “I was lucky enough to see it with my own eyes…everywhere there were men shouting and arguing like animals and women crying,” he wrote. In the poem “Dance of Death” in Poet in New York he made a scathing condemnation of the capitalistic greed “that pierces the heart of all poor children.” “Woe to you Wall Street!” he exclaimed. “Cobras shall hiss on the top floors/Nettles shall shake courtyards and terraces/The Stock Exchange shall become a pyramid of moss…,” he added. Lorca’s vision of Wall Street seems surprisingly prescient in the context of the recent global financial crisis that much of the world is still reeling from.
Equally bleak are his drawings that he created during his residence in New York. Composed in a surrealistic style, they conjure up images of death and destruction, despair and hopelessness – perhaps a direct projection of an impending apocalypse that he saw in the stock market crash.
But there is also an underlying touch of resurrection in some of these works that draw upon Biblical imageries. In his portrayal of San Cristobel (Saint Christopher) carrying the Christ Child (he wrote to his family of visiting the Metropolitan Museum to see the fourteenth century religious painting) or in his imagery of Christ’s resurrection in Self-Portrait with Flag and Fabulous Beast the message seems to be one of hope, and perhaps one of desire for the emergence of a modern-day prophet for redemption of the world.
Likewise, his drawing of Ode to Whitman is a tribute to the poet whom he admired for his writing in defiance of “heterosexual norms.” Also the poem of the same name in Poetry of New York is a celebration of homosexual love and a tribute to Whitman as someone whose artistic vision was like a beacon in the surrounding gloom: “New York, mire,/New York, mire and death./What angel is hidden in your cheek?/Whose perfect voice will sing the truths of wheat?...”
Lorca expressed similar optimism towards the works of T.S. Eliot whose The Waste Land he read in New York. For Lorca, The Waste Land must have represented the quintessential work on soulless, mindless conformist urban landscape. It’s possible that Eliot’s imagery powerfully resonated with him especially after his nightmarish vision of the colossal mass of humanity in Coney Island on the Fourth of July Holiday.
New York transformed Lorca. “I think everything of mine grows pale alongside these latest poems which are, so to speak, symphonic like the noise and complexity of New York,” he wrote to his parents in January of 1930 as he was closing in on his departure from the city. Again, shortly before his death he described his time spent there as “one of the key experiences in his life”.
Among Lorca’s personal effects at the exhibit was his flamenco guitar (Bob Dylan, Lou Read, Tomatio, Paco de Lucia, Patti Smith and Enrique Morente among others played it at various times as a homage to Lorca during their visits to his family home) that his family donated to the Lorca Foundation. Gazing at the guitar, I could almost visualize Lorca playing it in one of the quiet evenings at his home in Granada and reminiscing about his days in New York. In his lament for New York over high octane Flamenco, Lorca was most definitely experiencing both the transcending and transporting powers of duende!