Lightly corrected version of an article published
in Angélica [
Lorca and Censorship: The Gay Artist Made Heterosexual(1)
[until 1996]
daniel.eisenberg@bigfoot.com
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Lo curioso es
cómo en todos los artículos que acompañan a los sonetos
se evita cuidadosamente la palabra homosexual, aunque se aluda a ello, pues
nadie ignora que esos sonetos no están dedicados a una mujer. Se ve
que todavía ésa es palabra tabú en España, en
ciertos medios, como si el confesarlo fuese un descrédito para el
poeta. |
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|
Vicente Aleixandre(2) |
Censorship of creative people has been much in the
news this past year. When I was asked to speak on Lorca’s Sonetos
The person who wants to read or study Lorca has
been faced—and is still faced—with the problem of access to his
texts. This problem began during his lifetime. Lorca was a constant reviser of
his works, and careless with his manuscripts, now scattered over three
continents. He preferred oral presentation to distribution in book form. (His
friends sometimes called him “el último juglar”.) Just
before his death projects for editions of his collected works were discussed.
Immediately after his death his Obras completas began to appear. Yet the
project has been long and drawn-out, migrating from one publisher to another,
and remains uncompleted. It is the failure to make Lorca’s works
available, after his death, through publication that is my topic in this paper:
what happened, why it happened, and what its effects have been.
Not all of this has been due to censorship per
se. A significant portion of it is simply due to more conventional, though
still vexing reasons: competition between editors, lack of a central registry
for the manuscripts, their loss and misplacement through lack of care. Part of
the problem has been a family that has earned a reputation for venality on the
one hand—that’s the least of it—and for capricious decisions,
or refusing to decide at all, on the other. The family has squabbled among
itself: one person said one thing and another said something different. For
some fifteen years, from 1936 to 1951, the family had no procedure for signing
contracts. Either contracts didn’t get signed at all and everything sat
waiting, or someone would sign a contract and someone else would try to undo it(3). Also impeding editors and
scholars, as well as the general public, have been the various projects of the
Lorca family members to edit Federico’s works. They withheld permission
from others because they were going to edit Federico’s works themselves,
something for which they were, depending on the individual, intellectually or
emotionally unprepared to do (“Nuevos documentos”, pp. 102-107).
None of these projects ever materialized, but they hampered scholarly editors
for many years.
So being a Lorca scholar, for all its excitement,
is no bed of roses. But this is not my topic, which is simply censorship. Also,
I’m not going to deal with censorship of Lorca while he was alive. There
is no doubt that it existed. His plays occasionally had difficulties with the
authorities; the “Oda a Walt Whitman” was published only in a
private edition in
The scandal is not what happened when Federico
was alive, it is what happened after his death. The
central problem is not an unfamiliar one to scholars, and it has happened many
times over the years. Control of the works of a deceased writer or artist has
passed to his or her heirs, who have their own agendas. A valid question, and
this has come up with Lorca, is whether the laws of intellectual property are
correct to permit this sort of thing to happen. It was quite legal, for
example, for the widow of the orientalist Richard Burton to burn the manuscript
of an annotated translation almost ready for the press, a tragic loss.
In the case of Lorca this is not as well known as
it should be, because there has been an attempt to suppress it, a further
scandal. His relatives have never admitted censoring Lorca’s works, and
scholars have been pressured not to discuss it. In sum, Lorca’s works
have only been partially, selectively available to those who wished to read or
study him. In some cases, scholarship has been manipulated by selectively
granting and withholding access to texts and other Lorca material. Furthermore,
the situation is by no means completely resolved, although things are much
better than they used to be.
I’ve thought at length about how I feel
about this censorship, if there is something to be said for it. The tensions
causing the censorship of Lorca’s texts are the same tensions that
created his works; that is to say, the censorship of his writings after his
death is related to his suffering and the opposition to his sexuality when
alive. Yet even if art was the outcome, I find myself unable to rejoice in any
of it. That his works have been censored has had the paradoxical, but
unsurprising effect of increasing interest in them. The Sonetos
The governmental censorship did not preclude
Lorca’s works from being published outside
Yet the selective censorship of the family is not
gone completely, and while reports coincide in saying they have
mellowed—I don’t know them first-hand—the damage to fifty
years of Lorca readers and Lorca studies has been done. Others tragically
followed the model the family set of silence, withholding, and manipulation. So
while the family’s archive is now more or less open—not completely
open, by any means—other private collections, such as that of
Martínez Nadal, are not open to researchers at all.
What I’m going to do is to review the types
of censorship of Lorca’s works, and the effects of each type. After that
I will try to help you understand why he was censored. The types of censorship
are: killing the artist, destroying his manuscripts, withholding works from
publication, and altering works that are published. I’m talking about his
literary works, because that is where my expertise is and that is what I have
most studied. But much the same is the case with the drawings. Most of the
drawings you see here on exhibit were not only unavailable, but unknown only
ten years ago. Many drawings of Lorca are still missing or otherwise unavailable(5). There is also a
flagrant case of alteration of a drawing when it was reprinted, by simply
painting out of it a name the publisher did not like(6), and some
drawings have been reproduced with titles deleted(7).
1. The first type of censorship is killing the
writer. You all know, I expect, that Lorca was
executed in 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. There is a large
bibliography on Lorca’s death, the what, when, and somewhat less on the
why. It’s a bit like the bibliography on President Kennedy’s
assassination.
There are many possible reasons for the
execution, which range from friendship with leftist figures, which is documented,
to the alleged scorning of his assassin’s sister, which is not. The task
of sorting out these various potential and sometimes contradictory reasons is
not completed, despite conceptions to the contrary. A number of people had to
consent to the execution for it to have taken place, and these people surely
had reasons which at most were overlapping(8).
Still, the one person most directly involved, everyone agrees, was Ramón
Ruiz Alonso. We know quite a bit about him. He was a member of the Spanish parliament,
a newspaper worker, and published a book on Fascist political theory. He was
the one who sought Federico out in his hiding place, arrested him, and turned
him over to the military governor of
Some of Federico’s plays were very
controversial during his lifetime. Yerma, the story of a woman without
children, with homosexual overtones, was especially controversial. The
conservatives saw it as quite immoral(10).
Of course if one kills a writer, it is usually
not because of what he has already written, but because of what he will write
or is presently writing. The same man, Ruiz Alonso, was friends with the family
of one of Lorca’s lovers, Luis Rosales, and could well have known what
projects were underway. These included El público, a drama in which
pederasty is one of the central topics. Romeo can be a man of 30, and Juliet a
youth of 15, says the text. (Lorca was about 30 when writing this.) El
público was completed, though it had only just been finished. The
two copies of the revised text have disappeared, and all that is known is an
incomplete first draft. The second of Lorca’s works that was nearly
completed was his Sonetos del amor oscuro. Again, we only have access to a
first draft of this collection of homosexual sonnets. I’ll have more to
say of both of these later.
Then we come to the works of which we have no
known manuscript. Fortunately, Lorca was an author who talked a lot about what
he was writing and planned to write. He liked to recite his verse and to read
scenes from his plays in progress. He liked an audience, and there was no
shortage of people eager to listen to him.
Lorca had read to friends his tragedy La
destrucción de Sodoma, and we have two published fairly detailed
descriptions of its contents. “Federico was trying to substitute
homosexuality, so harshly condemned, for incest, but incest, definitively, is
set down in the deepest roots of humanity as a thing, totally, absolutely
forbidden, even in the most primitive races and peoples. Homosexuality, on the
other hand, exists even in animals; it is a natural manner of sexual
expression, and those who are inverted [homosexuals] will not procreate, but
they will create. And that was the idea of the work”(11).
So these works, which were well advanced or
completed, but uncirculated, could well have provoked the ire of someone who
saw himself, as the Spanish Catholics did, as defender of “the
family”. There is also El sueño de la vida (Comedia sin
título), in which the author dies in Act I (which we have) and
ascends to heaven in the third act (which we don’t). Yet we have been
deprived as well of works that were not yet written, and indeed the works not
even conceived. Lorca was only 38, he’d just resolved a creative block,
and was enthusiastic and writing furiously. In June of 1936, “creía comenzar ahora su verdadera carrera de
autor dramático”(12).
Ideas that he mentioned to his friends were Carne de cañón,
an anti-war drama; La bola negra, whose “tema esencial es...la
homosexualidad..., mejor dicho, el rechazo y la condena social de ese tipo de
relación amorosa” (Laffranque, p. 82); and La bestia hermosa,
based on a real incident, the story of a young man in love with his horse. His
father kills the horse, and is in turn murdered by the son(13).
And what would have been Federico’s subsequent projects?
To get killed for one’s writing is in a way
the ultimate tribute to the importance and power of one’s words. The
effect of the murder has been something like the famous and influential riot at
the premiere of Le sacré du printemps: it has marked the author
forever as one whose thinking was so dangerous that—Lorca would say like
Sophocles and Christ—he couldn’t be allowed to live.
That’s the first type of censorship.
The second type of censorship is the destruction
of his works. There is one report of a public bonfire of some copies of
Lorca’s published books, but there were so many copies of them in
circulation that no serious attempt was made to suppress his published works.
However, it is said with some frequency that some or many of Lorca’s unpublished
works, his manuscripts and correspondence, have been destroyed. If his
unavailable works have been destroyed, then we can lament them, but we
don’t have to do anything. We don’t have to find them, or wonder
why they their holders won’t release them and what to do to change their
minds. We don’t have to write in the prefaces to our books that what
follows is based on incomplete access to the author’s texts. It is an
easy explanation to make because
I’m by nature somewhat of an optimist, and
I hope that these allegedly destroyed works will reappear. (We have recently
had a vital ms. of Huckleberry Finn appear after more than a century,
and Sade’s 120 journées de Sodome, stolen in 1789 and
thought lost, was not published until 1904, and it was then taken to be a
pastiche.(14)) Of course the definitive refutation of a claim that
manuscripts have been destroyed is to produce the manuscripts, and I
can’t do this. But there are numerous examples of works of Lorca, and
other members of his generation, which were previously thought to have been
lost, and which have reappeared: his early play El malificio de la mariposa,
El público, the Sonetos
Before I accept something as destroyed,
especially one of Lorca’s late works, written when he was internationally
famous, I’d at least like to know how it happened. Who had it in his or
her hands, what that person did with it: who burned it, if it was burned.
There are three such cases in which there is a
statement from a person who said “I myself destroyed something Lorca
wrote”. According to Schonberg, García Carrillo destroyed
Lorca’s letters to him(16).
For all of Schonberg’s failings, which are many and serious, I have yet
to find that he has misquoted his sources. Miguel Cerón told Agustín Penón that he
“quemó casi todos los papeles que tenía de Federico”
(Gibson, Agustín Penón, p. 71). The other person is
the American, Philip Cummings, who says he destroyed an autobiographical
manuscript of 50 pages that Lorca had left with him in 1929. According to
Cummings, he ran across it many years later, and found that Lorca had written
at the end “Felipe, si no te pido estas hojas en diez años y si
algo me pase, ten la bondad, por Dios, de quemármelas”(17).
I’m not sure there ever was such a manuscript. Cummings is a liar who
invents things that make him look important. Cummings felt that the days Lorca
spent with him during the former’s visit to the
I hope that the time of deliberate destruction of
Lorca’s works is past. Anyone who wanted to destroy a Lorca manuscript
has now had 55 years to do so. Now the biggest problem may be that to publish
materials would mean admitting publicly that one had suppressed them for so
long. Someone might find it preferable to see something lost rather than face
the shame of having the concealment known. What worries me at least as much is
the risk of accidental destruction—the person with some Lorca material
hidden away dies, and the discover doesn’t know
what it is and throws it out. There have already been some minor instances of
Lorca manuscripts accidentally destroyed in this way, or misplaced, which
amounts to the same thing(18).
3. Rather than destroying Lorca’s works,
more common has been withholding his works. That is to say, we know for a fact
that the holder of a Lorca manuscript or letter refused, or still refuses, to
let it be published. This is a large category. Some has been for straightforward
commercial (financial) or sentimental reasons. The most important withheld
works, however, have sexual content or overtones. Lorca’s family
systematically, for years, withheld texts dealing with sexuality. The family
also attempted to keep others, such as Martínez Nadal, from publishing
manuscripts in their possession when these had a sexual component. Others have
suppressed works motu proprio: especially noteworthy today, because
unresolved, is the case of “Habla la santísima Virgen”. This
poem, associated with if not part of Poeta en Nueva York, has never been
published, and its present location is unknown. The French Hispanist Mathilde
Poms, who owned the manuscript, described it in terms which (when we recall the
sexuality of the “Oda al Santísimo Sacramento del altar”)
suggest that it combined sexuality and religion(19).
The first collected edition of Lorca’s
works appeared in
Several major works were missing from this
collection. One was Poeta en Nueva York. The possessor of the
manuscript, José Bergamín, had his own plans to publish it. Diván
del Tamarit, taken out of
Works, letters, and drawings have surfaced over
the past fifty years, in big bursts or dribs and drabs, many of them changing
significantly the shape of Lorca studies. I don’t have time to go over
all the different instances and the factors involved in each.
I will discuss two cases in some detail as
examples, two cases that are both extremely important and which share some
parallels. The first is that of El público. It has been called
the most important work of twentieth century Spanish theater, and was very well
received when produced in the 1980’s. A Spanish theatrical magazine has
taken the title of the play, as its name.
El público is theater about the
theater, about the relationship between characters, actors, and audience. In
the theater Romeo and Juliet is to be produced, and there are references
to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The true theater disturbs people,
mirroring thoughts and desires we prefer not to admit. The play affirms the
validity of all sexual desire, and homosexual desire in particular.
What we know about this work, and what access we
have to it, is primarily due to Rafael Martínez Nadal. Nadal published a
first draft. It is missing one act (of six), a fact that is consistently
overlooked when the play is produced. No one, to my knowledge, has tried to
surmise what the rest of the work might suggest about the missing act.
According to Nadal, there were two completed,
typed manuscripts of the play. He saw them only a few weeks before
Lorca’s execution. The location of those two copies is unknown.
Now this is a situation that disturbs me, and it
disturbs me more because I seem to be the only one concerned about it. We have
a work that is taken to be a masterpiece. It is one of the most important plays
ever written in Spanish. All we have of it is a messy first draft, minus an
act. Two clean, revised copies have vanished. One can speculate—I
certainly have speculations about where they might be, but no hard evidence.
One possible holder is José Luis Cano, who was editor of the literary
monthly Ínsula and who had, we know not by what route, a
manuscript of La casa de Bernarda Alba in advance of its publication.
Another possibility is Luis Rosales. Lorca was hiding in Luis Rosales’
house before his death, and we know he was writing there. Rosales, whose
credibility is rather low, says that his father turned over all of
Lorca’s manuscripts to Lorca’s father, but the family spokesman
says that is not so, and that the family does not have anything that Rosales
gave them. If one could search the libraries of these two people, Cano and
Rosales, which one can not do because to ask would be to admit that one does
not trust them, there might be some surprises. Another place to look, and I
have not a clue how to get access—I’ve tried—is the closed
personal archive of General Franco, also under the exclusive control of his
heirs, where there is at the least an extensive collection of unpublished
documents about Lorca’s death. It’s not impossible, if Lorca was
executed because of his works, that some of his works are there as well. If one
could examine Martínez Nadal’s collection of Lorca manuscripts,
there would be surprises as well, for Nadal has admitted holding unpublished
Lorca materials(20).
But we are in Nadal’s debt for going ahead,
breaking the law of intellectual property, and publishing El público.
His edition appeared in 1970, 34 years after Lorca’s death. He told us in
an introduction that it would have appeared earlier, but that Lorca’s
brother Francisco asked him to wait, since he hoped to find one of the final
copies. If Nadal had followed the advice of Lorca’s brother, this
masterpiece might still be unpublished. Ian Gibson tells us that the topic of
homosexuality was prohibited by Lorca family members (Francisco and Isabel)(21). When one considers what an
important role homosexuality has in El público, one cannot help
but wonder if Francisco was sincere when he said his reason in asking Nadal to
wait was so that the final text could be published instead of a draft.
The situation regarding another masterpiece,
Lorca’s Sonetos
These are Petrarchan sonnets on homosexual
love. As with El público, we have only a draft text. We
don’t know whether it is complete or not. It is assumed, though not
confirmed as is true of El público, that from this draft there was
made a typed fair copy. It is also believed, though this is an old speculation
rather than confirmed fact, that said copy was in the possession of
Lorca’s lover Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, the inspiration for
some if not all the poems. It is assumed that it was lost either when
Rapún’s house in Madrid was bombed—not burned—or when
he was killed in combat in 1937. This is speculation. No one knows. They could
just as well have been in Lorca’s possession when he was arrested and
taken off to his death, in that group of missing manuscripts which Rosales says
his father gave to Lorca’s father, but which is not to be found. Rosales also
said that there were additional sonnets, besides those known today, which
Federico was writing while hiding in Rosales’ house. Nothing is known of
the fate of these.
In contrast with El público,
however, the drafts of the Sonetos
The tensions aroused produced a clandestine
edition of the Spanish texts of the sonnets in 1983. The circumstances of this
edition have never been made public, perhaps because of fear of legal action.
The imprint,
This edition had its fifteen minutes of fame; it
was reprinted in many publications, and discussed on radio and television. The Sonetos
After a few weeks of this, and growing public
pressure, Lorca’s sister decided to permit ABC to publish the sonnets to
be published in 1984. (Numerous requests had come from a variety of publishers
in the past.) ABC paid a million pesetas for each sonnet.
This also marked the point at which the
family—Isabel and the spokesman the Montesinos—first revealed to
the public the contents of their archive. These include hundreds of pages of
juvenilia, fragments or complete texts of many early works, which we had not
known even existed, and extensive correspondence with
his family. While this was a watershed in Lorca studies(23),
the bulk of the juvenilia remains unpublished and unavailable.
So works of Lorca have been withheld for periods
of time ranging from four to fifty years. We know still of several collections
of Lorca’s correspondence in existence, which are not available to
researchers: among them letters to Dalí, Martínez Nadal, and his
early musical mentor, and fellow homosexual, Adolfo Salazar. The history of his
texts suggests that other texts are still in existence and being withheld.
These might include works we have not even heard of and wouldn’t know to
look for.
On the handout I have provided two tables that
summarize this situation. The first is of works that were suppressed and have
been released, and the other is of works that may still exist—certainly
most existed at one time—but are not yet available.
4. The next type of censorship is altering an
author’s works. I don’t know of an example of someone just out and
out rewriting lines of Lorca for ideological reasons. There is a fair amount of
hypercorrection by editors; for example, one, unsatisfied with Lorca’s
poetical but eloquent punctuation, went through and repunctuated a whole book
of verse as if it were prose. There is the usual crop of typographical errors,
handwriting poorly deciphered, accidental but real editorial errors. This is
one reason the original manuscripts are so important.
What there has been a good bit
of is selective deletion of words: publishing fragments of letters, a paragraph
or two paragraphs, and then omitting the rest. When Lorca wrote to Carlos Morla
Lynch, “¡Muera el Papa que es un puerco espín!, this was published as “!Muera el ....!”(24)
One recent example of this sort of one-word censorship is in the title of the
Sonetos del amor oscuro collection. They have only been published in
The reason given for rejecting the title is that we
do not have any testimony of it in Federico’s own hand, and the reports
of it are all indirect. Yet the indirect testimonies of Federico’s use of
this title are overwhelming. The following members of his circle used that
title and no other: Vicente Aleixandre, Pablo Neruda, Francisco Ayala, Luis
Cernuda, Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Rafael Martínez Nadal, Giner de los
Ríos, Guillermo de Torre, Manuel Altolaguirre, José
Bergamín, and Manuel Benítez Inglott(26). Against all
these witnesses for the title Sonetos del amor oscuro, there is not one for the
title Sonetos de amor, which is the only title the family permits to be
published. If you look in the Aguilar edition of his Obras (in)completas, the only standard edition so far since none of
the other projects have been completed, you won’t find any indication
that Federico wrote Sonetos
5. This concludes the things one can do to an
author’s work: destroy it, suppress it, alter it, silence
the author so it won’t even be produced. Yet I’m going to conclude
with two additional types of peripheral censorship. The first of these is
censoring the censorship: that is, disguising and suppressing the fact that
censorship has even taken place. No one from within the Lorca family has
admitted that they ever censored anything. It has all taken place under cover
of “protecting their brother’s interests”. One should not
publish the drafts because the final versions may turn up. But they
don’t. The works are not revised, and not ready for publication, and they
require a “philological” edition. But when the author was killed,
and was deliberately writing “unproduceable” plays, then of course many of his writings were not ready for
publication. This doesn’t mean that given the possibility of publication,
Federico wouldn’t have been eager to take advantage of the changed
circumstances.
It is admitted by everyone save the Lorca family
that it was only because of the clandestine edition of the Sonetos
6. Finally, there is the censorship of secondary
information about Lorca. There has been a good bit of this too, and again even
the fact that the censorship has taken place is also suppressed. The official
investigations and reports on Lorca’s death are not available to anyone,
including Ian Gibson. Jorge Guillén’s statements about
Lorca’s death were censored, as were those of Rafael Alberti(28).
One of the fundamental sources for Lorca’s
biography is a diary kept by the Chilean ambassador Carlos Morla Lynch. Morla
sponsored a gay literary salon in
If someone is silenced and censored, it is
because others do not like what he or she is saying or doing. So I thought it
would help put Lorca’s works in better perspective to provide a
reconstruction of his ideology on the topic of sex. This is not just a question
of what caused his works to be withheld; any mention of homosexuality was
enough for that, without worrying about niceties. Incidentally, while
So I’m going a bit beyond just the question
of homosexuality, which is the largest single issue, and try to explain what
made Lorca, in the area of sexuality, an innovative, controversial, and even
today, perhaps, a dangerous figure. It is based on the following sources:
first, his available works and correspondence, with special emphasis on the
works that were withheld in the past. Secondly, I have used Federico’s
and others’ comments on the works which we do not have. Hopefully access
to more texts will permit this to be refined in the future.
I’ve thought about whether I wanted to tone
down some of Lorca’s ideas in presenting them to you. Some of them may
not please you. But I’ve decided I shouldn’t do that. Some of his
ideas were relatively unsurprising in his own day, but are anathema now, and
others are ones we have come to accept, while in his own culture they were
utterly taboo.
An idea that was quite taboo in his own day, yet
which has come into our ideological mainstream, is that the sexual drive is
something both inherently good and very powerful. It is fundamental, and can be
diverted but not denied. Attempts to suppress it cause it to reappear in
strange places: sadism and bizarre religious practices, for example. The goodness
of sex was a dangerous idea in Catholic society.
Secondly, social justice is inseparably linked
with sexual liberation. A just society cannot be sexually repressive, and a
sexually free society will inevitably be a just one(31).
Christ came to set people free in a sexual sense as well as a religious and a
social sense.
Another idea that recently has become acceptable
in the
One can write literature with homosexual
protagonists. Lorca’s writing career shows a progression towards more
open treatment of homosexual characters and concerns. In El malificio de la
mariposa, insects represent characters, and there is a strong theme of
sexual alienation. In Yerma women speak—in part—for
homosexuals. Homosexuals openly appear in Poeta en Nueva York, El
público, and the Sonetos
Now we’re going to get onto a little bit
more dangerous territory. Another part of Lorca’s sexual ideology is that
homosexuals, who do not procreate, are the cultural creators (Auclair, p. 105).
(This comes up in American gay culture with some frequency.) The artists, the
writers, the movers and the shakers, when one looks at society with a broad
historical view, are homosexuals. There was a book on this, now quite a rare
book, by Alberto Nin Frías: Homosexualismo creador (Madrid:
Javier Morata, 1933), which Lorca read. For example, Christ was homosexual. His
all-male disciples were a homosexual group. He had one special “beloved
disciple”(33). This idea
has been around for a long time in Catholic, monastic circles, and
Lorca’s long-unavailable “Oda al santísimo
As part of this, Lorca would add that women are
not the movers and the shakers, that women are, and should be, the mothers and
the homemakers. Women need men more than men need women. Of all his ideas this
is the one I am personally the least happy with, but it was not very surprising
or offensive in early twentieth-century
In his “Oda a Walt Whitman” Federico
expresses the position that one can choose to be homosexual or heterosexual:
“Puede el hombre, si quiere, conducir su deseo por vena de coral o
celeste desnudo”(34).
Straights could decide voluntarily to be homosexual, and maybe they ought to do
that. This idea is around today only in the case of Lesbians. If women really
get their heads together, and realize how they are oppressed by the patriarchal
nature of our society—the natural result, some Lesbians claim, is to turn
one’s interest, affection, and sexuality toward women. “Feminism is
the theory, Lesbianism the practice.” But to apply this to men—to
say that men could voluntarily and freely choose to live a homosexual life and
are not forced to do it by a biological identity—is beyond the pale
today. Because if men can choose, then straights can decide
to be gay, and perhaps they should think about whether that would be a good
idea. Gays could also choose to be straight, which is an explosive idea
in gay circles even today.
In his last works, Federico seemed to have
changed to a different position: that sexual desire is mysterious and
uncontrollable. In one of his uncompleted plays, El sueño de la vida—it
is also known as Comedia sin título—we find a reference to A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. Again, this is a play with a Shakespeare
play within it. “Todo en la
obra tiende a demostrar que el amor, sea de la clase que sea, es una casualidad
y no depende de nosotros en absoluto.... La reina de las hadas, Titania, se
enamora de un campesino con cabeza de asno. Es una
verdad terrible.”(35)
And on the topic of Bottom the ass and falling in
love inappropriately, an idea that is still on the outer fringes of the
acceptable in this country is that intergenerational love—pederasty,
specifically—is just as valid as any other type of love. Love is love.
Romeo can be a man of 30, and Juliet a youth of 15. Of consenting sexual acts,
it is the one that is most energetically suppressed in the
Remember, too, the young man in love with his
horse. In La casa de Bernarda Alba, the warm and sensual grandmother,
shut up in a room by her daughter, appears with a lamb in her arms. “Mejor es tener una oveja que no
tener nada”, she says. Love is love.
Finally, on Lorca’s sexual ideology, there
is the importance of homosexuality in
I want to emphasize to you, in conclusion, that
the censorship of Lorca’s works is by no means completely resolved. The
situation is much, much improved from what it used to be. When one mentions
homosexuality and Lorca, ashes and soot are no longer called down on your head.
The pretense that he was heterosexual has been dropped, although the
significance of his sexuality is still disputed. The Sonetos
Yet the effects of the past censorship are still
with us. We have had fifty years of scholarship based on partial access to
texts, fifty years of editions of allegedly complete works that really
weren’t complete. I’d like to have eventually a published volume of
The Censored Lorca, to focus attention on just what has been suppressed. But we
don’t have this, partly because there is so much embarrassment over the
issue, partly because it would inevitably be incomplete.
So when you are reading something about Lorca,
ask yourself how much of what Lorca wrote the author had access to. And to what
extent that writer knew that his or her own work was based on incomplete
knowledge of what Lorca wrote, or on other scholars with such incomplete knowledge.
Many writers on Lorca (such as Binding) are not even
aware that the Aguilar so-called complete works vary considerably from one
edition to another, and that none of them is truly complete. Also ask yourself
whether the author had reason to fear reprisals if Lorca’s sexuality was
mentioned. Ask yourself, also, to what extent any of
us can say anything about Lorca that isn’t provisional, when some of his
works, and much of his correspondence, remains unavailable.
Because this is really the bottom line, and this
is why I accepted the invitation to speak here today. Lorca’s writings
are still not available to us in their entirety. Sometimes it is merely a
question of money. When someone comes up with enough cash (I don’t know
how much cash), Lorca’s letters to Salvador Dalí will be
published. (For someone interested in Lorca and art, they might well be
important.) They are in the hands of Dalí’s executor, and
presumably, since they are for sale, they are where no harm will befall them. I
assume that the materials in the hands of Martínez Nadal, which includes
correspondence and some mysterious “personal papers”, will reach
safe harbor after his death. Only then will we learn what he has withheld and
why. Martínez Nadal, of course, is the one who has given us the most
data about Lorca’s homosexuality: it is he who has confirmed for us that
Lorca’s lover just before his trip to New York was Emilio Aladrén,
and has written at the greatest length about the place of homosexuality in the
circles they moved in in Madrid in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s(38). So what is he
suppressing, and why?
Yet there are other materials at risk. (I’m
only mentioning the major examples.) No one is looking for the revised,
complete manuscripts of El público or the Sonetos
The artist or writer lives on in his or her
works. Even if the works survive in some form, as is the case of Poeta en
Nueva York, El público, and the Sonetos del amor oscuro, if we
lack the revised or variant texts—and Lorca was a constant
reviser—; if we don’t have the manuscripts to prepare accurate editions(41); if we don’t know
the order of his poems—Lorca ordered his poems carefully—his light
is that much dimmer, and he is a little bit more dead. I, for one, would be
sorry to see that happen.
These materials may become available sooner if we
can admit that Lorca was a homosexual writer and a homosexual thinker. It is my
belief that he would want us to to think of him that way. I hope that now,
fifty-five years after his execution, everyone, including his family, can
accept this and even rejoice in it.
Table I: Major Lorca Texts Not Currently Available
Text: Hundreds of pages of juvenilia (“a ton of
materials”), including Místicas, and “más de
cien poemas inéditos”(42).
Notes: In the family archive, now the Fundación García
Lorca. A 3-volume edition was promised some years ago. [Two volumes now
published in Cátedra.]
Text: “Varios...poemas lorquianos juveniles que
obran en el archivo del norteamericano [Agustín Penón] al lado de
una pequeña e interesante pieza teatral de quince holandesas, Primitivo
auto sentimental, fechada el 4 de diciembre de 1918.”
Notes: “Hubiera querido dar a conocer estos manuscritos
aquí, pero el secretario de la Fundación García Lorca, don
Manuel Fernández-Montesinos García, ha negado su permiso para
ello” (Gibson, Agustín Penón, p. 227).
Text: Last page of El malificio de la mariposa
Notes: Lost?
Text: La niña que riega la albahaca y el
príncipe preguntón
Notes: Apparently lost. A forgery purporting to be the lost text
appeared in 1982 and is found in the Obras completas as genuine.
Text: “Ferias”
Notes: Two poems are known; two lists give slightly different versions
of the titles of the other eight and the order of the collection. This
“Suite” was auctioned in 1977, and one of the poems we have is only
known from its publication in the auction catalogue(43).
Text: Lectures “Paraíso cerrado para muchos, jardines
abiertos para pocos” and “Imaginación, inspiración,
evasión”; “Presentación” of Sánchez
Mejías in
Notes: Known only from detailed newpaper reports.
Text: “Habla la santísima Virgen”
Notes: A draft of 11 verses was published by Martínez Nadal in
1974. As discussed above, the entire poem was felt too offensive for
publication by its owner Mathilde Pomès; its present location is
unknown.
Text: Final manuscript of Poeta en Nueva York, showing the
order of the collection
Notes: If the MS were to appear, it would embarrass the official editor
of the work, Eutimio Martín, so little effort has gone into finding it. [This manuscript, whose existence was denied by Martín,
surfaced in the 1990’s, but remains unpublished as of December, 2002.]
Text: Viaje a la luna (filmscript)
Notes: Full text only available in English translation. Thanks to the
persistence of Christopher Maurer, the unpublished portion of the Spanish text,
minus a page, has been rediscovered. After months of searching by Emilio
Amero’s widow, in Norman, Oklahoma, it was found in the drawer of a
telephone table (!) which was about to be discarded. [A complete Spanish text
has appeared; not clear if the missing Spanish sections were retranslated from
English. A movie based on this script appeared in 1998.]
Text: “Alpha”
Notes: Mentioned in a newspaper article in 1930(44). In 1935
Lorca published the poem “Omega”.
Text: Act IV of El público
Notes:
Text: Two revised manuscripts of El público
Notes: Only the draft, minus Act IV, has appeared.
Text: Act II of El sueño de la vida (Comedia sin
título)
Notes: Lorca read scenes from it to friends.
Text: Revised, typed manuscript of the Sonetos
Notes: Only the draft has appeared. The work has yet to be published in
Text: La destrucción de Sodoma
Notes: One act was read to friends, and existed on paper. A one-page fragment
has been published. Three acts were described to a friend.
Text: Works Lorca was writing while in hiding in the Rosales’
house, just before his death. Unknown sonnets have been twice mentioned.
Notes: The Rosales family says they were turned over to the Lorca
family. The Lorca family denies
this.
Text: Carne de cañón, La bola negra,
La bestia hermosa (El hombre y la jaca), Caín y Abel, La
sangre no tiene voz, Casa de maternidad, other projects
Notes: Only very brief notes are known. Probably no more was
written. The available information is collected by Marie Laffranque in Teatro
inconcluso.
Text: “Personal papers” entrusted to Rafael
Martínez Nadal. Nadal has declined to reveal what they are.
Notes:
Text: Letters to and from Emilio Aladrén(45),
Vicente Aleixandre(46), Manuel Altolaguirre, Joaquín Amigo,
Pepín Bello, Eduardo Blanco-Amor, Luis Buñuel(47),
Luis Cernuda, Salvador Dalí, Francisco García Lorca, his father
Federico García Rodríguez(48), Sebastián Gasch,
his mother Vicenta Lorca Romero(49), Rafael Martínez Nadal,
Carlos Morla Lynch(50), Juan Ramón Masoliver(51),
Emilio Prados, José Antonio Primo de Rivera(52), Fernando de
los Ríos, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, Luis Rosales, Eduardo
Rodríguez Valdivielso(53), José Antonio Rubio
Sacristán, Adolfo Salazar(54), Pedro Salinas, Margarita
Xirgu, Jorge Zalamea; very likely others.
Notes: Most of these correspondents were homosexual or bisexual.
Lorca’s correspondence with heterosexual correspondents has been
published. Some letters to Dalí, Gasch, Morla, Salazar, Rubio
Sacristán and Zalamea, and his family have been published. [Some
additional letters have been published.]
Table II: Available Texts Previously Withheld from the Public
(Individual Poems Not Included)
Title: Poeta en Nueva York
Date published: 1940
Notes: Unavailable for the first (1938) edition of complete works.
Commercial motives rather than censorship. A family representative
(Martín) has recently said the work should not have been published at
all without an examination of the manuscript, “para ver si estaba en
condiciones o no de salir al público”. (“Los
puntos sobre los íes”, Quimera, March 1982, p. 17.)
Title: Diván del Tamarit
Date published: 1940
Notes: Set in type in 1936 in
Title: La casa de Bernarda Alba
Date published: 1945
Notes: Known to survive since 1938. Family denied permission for
production and publication.
Title: El público (draft)
Date published: 1970
Notes: Family asked that the draft not be published; no other MS has
surfaced.
Title: Impresiones y paisajes
Date published: 1973
Notes: Original 1917 edition available only in private libraries of
Lorca’s friends. Only brief excerpts were permitted by the family in prior
editions of his complete works.
Title: Oda al santísimo sacramento del
altar; Oda y burla de Sesostris y Sardanápalo; Oda al toro de lidia
(fragment).
Date published: 1974; 1985
Notes: Two extracts from the Oda al santísimo
Title: El sueño de la vida (Comedia
sin título) (Act I)
Date published: 1976
Notes: Existence unknown. The title became known only after publication
of the text.
Title: Lola la comedianta (libretto)
Date published: 1981
Notes: Mentioned briefly, under a different title (El calesero),
in 1963.
Title: Suites (reconstruction)
Date published: 1983
Notes: Family withheld permission to publish completed edition for ten
years.
Title: Sonetos
Date published: 1983
Notes: Existence admitted by one family member (Francisco), denied by
another after the first’s death (Manolo Montesinos). The validity of the
title is still denied. First known to survive when titles
were published in 1976. A French translation antedated the Spanish texts
by some years, causing protests. Clandestine, not-for-sale edition forced
authorized edition.
Title: “Alocución al pueblo de Fuentevaqueros”
Date published: 1986
Notes: A newspaper report of the speech was known, but the text was not
known to exist.
Title: Drawings
Date published: 1986
Notes: Drawings held by the family were known but unavailable, as were
photographs. Many drawings held by others had been published some thirty years
earlier.
Title: Los sueños de mi prima Aurelia (Act I)
Date published: 1987
Notes: Known to exist.
Title: Correspondence
Date published:
Notes: Several hundred letters have been published, most in small
quantities. Most were unknown before they were published.
NOTES
(1). Esta conferencia fue presentada en el
(2). José Luis Cano, Los
cuadernos de Velintonia (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986), pp. 284-285.
(3). “Nuevos documentos relativos a la edición de Poeta en Nueva York y otras obras de García Lorca”, Anales de Literatura Española [Alicante], 5 (1986-87 [1988]), 67-107, at pp. 82-104. [Available online at http://bigfoot.com/~daniel.eisenberg]
(4). In fairness, it must be admitted that if the Lorca family had permitted the publication of Impresiones y paisajes, the Sonetos del amor oscuro, or El público during the Franco period, the government would have prohibited or censored them.
(5). “Notice of Certain Drawings which have Perished or Have Not Been Found”, Mario Hernández, Line of Light and Shadow. The Drawings of Federico García Lorca, trans. Christopher Maurer (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 259-261. Hernández has not used the information on unpublished drawings, including at least one lost one, in my “A Catalogue of Lorca’s Drawings”, García Lorca Review, 4 (1976), 13-31, at pp. 26-27.
(6). This is the drawing bearing the words
“Amor novo”, published in Salvador Novo’s Seamen Rhymes
(Buenos Aires, 1934). When reprinted by Gregorio Prieto in Dibujos de
García Lorca, 2nd ed. (
(7). Including the openly suggestive
“Material nupcial” on the bust of a sailor. (Compare Obras
completas, 23rd ed.,
(8). See my “Unanswered Questions about Lorca’s Death”, Angélica,
1 (1991), 93-107. [Available online
at http://bigfoot.com/~daniel.eisenberg]
(9). Ian Gibson, El asesinato de García Lorca, 3a edición (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1979), p. 192; Agustín Penón: Diario de una búsqueda lorquiana (1955-56) (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1990), p. 46. “Era un poeta pornográfico” (José Jover Tripaldi, who guarded Lorca just before his execution, quoted in Agustín Penón, p. 56).
(10). On the contemporary reactions to Yerma, see Corpus Barga,
“Yerma y la política”, Diario de Madrid,
January 6, 1935, reprinted in his Crónicas literarias, ed. Arturo Ramoneda Salas (Madrid:
Júcar, 1984), pp. 247-250; also Ian Gibson, Federico García
Lorca. 2. De Nueva York a Fuente Grande 1929-1936 (Barcelona: Grijalbo,
1987), pp. 336-338 and 378-379. “Lo que había contra él era
un odio feroz de las ultraderechas granadinas. Le odiaba el catolicismo
más duro, especialmente por Yerma. A partir de su estreno tiene
enemigos serios.” (“Ian Gibson: ‘En 1986 lo sabemos casi todo
sobre Lorca’”, La vanguardia, August 19, 1986, pp. 20-21, on
p. 21.)
(11). Suzanne Byrd, “La destrucción de Sodoma: A Reconstruction of Federico García Lorca’s Lost Drama”, García Lorca Review 4 (1976), 105-108. Byrd quotes recollections of Luis Sáenz de la Calzada. Of course the statements about incest would not be endorsed by modern anthropologists.
(12). Adolfo Salazar, “La
casa de Bernarda Alba”, cited by Marie Laffranque, Teatro inconcluso
(Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1987), p. 96.
(13). On all of these, see Laffranque, pp. 72-87, who publishes the fragment of La bola negra.
(14). The 120 Days of
(15). That La niña is a forgery was argued by André Belamich in his introduction to his French translation of Lorca’s theater. There is also, in my opinion, a false letter, that to Addie Cummings, the mother of Lorca’s friend and lover Philip Cummings (Epistolario, ed. Christopher Maurer, Madrid: Alianza, 1983, II, 132). I believe this letter, whose original has not been seen by any scholar, was “created” by the highly unreliable and inventive Philip Cummings.
(16). From an interview I conducted with Schonberg in 1974.
(17). “Poeta en Nueva
York”: Historia y problemas de un texto de Lorca (Barcelona: Ariel,
1976), p. 181, n. 155.
(18). One of the most striking examples of loss of manuscript pages through
lack of care is the first four pages of the autograph of La casa de Bernarda
Alba, lent by Francisco García Lorca to a student magazine at Vassar
College, reproduced in facsimile in the magazine and never returned, or
returned but misplaced. (La casa
de Bernarda Alba, ed. Mario Hernández, 2nd edition, Madrid: Alianza,
1984, p. 163.) Similarly, as late as 1969 a page of the autograph draft
of “La imagen poética de don Luis de Góngora” was
published by Gregorio Prieto, Lorca en color (Madrid: Nacional, 1969),
p. 150; according to Christopher Maurer (Conferencias, Madrid: Alianza,
1984, I, 87) this autograph draft is now lost. “El manuscrito autógrafo de ese poema [“Luz”] se
encontraba, hasta 1976 al menos, en poder de Luis Rosales, a quien Lorca se lo
regaló, al igual que otros poemas. No he podido consultarlo, porque ha
desaparecido de la biblioteca del ilustre poeta, según su propio
testimonio” (Miguel García Posada, Obras II: Poesía II,
Madrid: Akal, 1982, p. 770).
(19). Apparently no one has looked at
Pomès’ writings on Lorca to see if there are allusions to this
poem. Her potentially most relevant writings are an afterward (pp. 141-154) to
the French translation of Romancero gitan. Poème du cante jondo. Chant funèbre
pour Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (Paris, 1959), and “Le paganisme de
Lorca”, Europe, Nos. 345-346 (January-February 1958), pp. 167-169.
The comment we do have is: “Mieux vaut ne
pas traduire la réponse de la Vierge qui est d’une fantaisie
échevelée qui ne choquerait peut-être pas en Andalousie,
‘tierra de María Santísima’, autant dire d’une
sainte patronne qu’on met à toutes les sauces, mais ferait hausser
les épaules aux incrédules pour ne rien dire des croyants”.
(“Un poème inédit de Lorca”, Le journal des
poètes, No. 5, May 1950; quoted by Eutimio Martín, Poeta
en Nueva York, Barcelona: Ariel, 1981, p. 191. On
Martín’s edition, see below, note 40.)
Miguel García-Posada censors Pomès
when he translates her comment in his Obras II. Poesía II, p. 727.
(20). In “El último día de Federico García Lorca en Madrid”, in El público (Oxford: Dolphin, 1970), p. 15, and in a conversation with me in 1987. During this conversation Nadal denied the existence of the large collection of Lorca’s letters in his possessions, which others have informed me of. A new piece of information on Nadal’s collection has appeared: Light of Line and Shadow, p. 260.
(21). “Hay muchos
lorquistas en torno a la familia que no han mencionado la palabra homosexual en
sus escritos por temor a problemas. Yo no he querido ser así. Hay que
ser honrado y decir que Lorca era homosexual.” (“Ian Gibson:
‘En 1986 lo sabemos casi todo sobre Lorca’”, La vanguardia,
August 19, 1986, pp. 20-21, on p. 20).
(22). Neruda’s text,
reproduced in the 1983 princeps of the Sonetos del amor oscuro, is from
his Para nacer he nacido (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1978), pp. 107-108.
The famous text of Aleixandre is from his “Federico”, Hora de
España, No. 7 (1937), 43-45, reprinted in Homenaje al poeta
García Lorca contra su muerte (Valencia-Barcelona: Ediciones
Españolas, 1937), pp. 27-30, and included in the Aguilar edition of
Lorca’s works.
(23). For documentation of
many of the above points on the Sonetos del amor oscuro, see my
“Reaction to the Publication of the Sonetos del amor oscuro”,
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 65 (1988), 261-271 [available, without the
editing imposed by the journal as a condition of publication, at
http://bigfoot.com/~daniel.eisenberg], and Víctor Infantes, “Lo
‘oscuro’ de los Sonetos del amor oscuro de Federico
García Lorca”, in Federico García Lorca. Saggi critici nel cinquantenario della morte, a cura di Gabriele Morelli (Fasano:
Schena, 1988), pp. 57-88.
(24). The letter may most conveniently be read in Epistolario, ed. Christopher Maurer (Madrid: Alianza, 1983), II, 126-127. Unfortunately I cannot remember who it was who explained that the missing word was “Pope”, if in fact anyone previously has said it. If I have taken someone’s idea without proper credit, it is my failure of memory. If no one has made this suggestion before, I cannot conceive of anyone else who would receive, in June, 1929, such condemnation from Lorca, whose name or title would in turn be censored. On the Pope in 1929—Lorca was soon to write “Grito hacia Roma”—see Christopher Maurer, “Notes on the Poems”, Poet in New York (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), pp. 259-276, at p. 275.
(25). Miguel
García-Posada, “Un monumento al amor”, ABC, March 17,
1984, pp. 43-44.
(26). “Reaction to the Publication”, p. 264.
(27). Both quotations from ABC,
(28). The concluding chapter (XV) of Guillén’s “Federico en persona” was excluded from the Aguilar Obras (in)completas until the 1980’s. Alberti: Litoral, 8/9 (1969), p. 14.
(29). The address (in 1985) of Morla’s
granddaughter is: Verónica Morla, Príncipe de Vergara, 57, Esc. A, 8º B, 28006
(30). “A country that is often hostile to biographical inquiry” (Christopher Maurer, “The Black Pain” [review article on Gibson’s biography], The New Republic, January 1, 1990, pp. 29-34, on p. 20).
(31). “¿Antes de la
revolución social no hubo en Rusia la revolución sexual?”
(Corpus Barga, p. 250).
(32). “Yo misma y varios de
sus numerosos amigos hemos podido frecuentarlo durante años sin
sospechar que era homosexual” (Vida y muerte de García Lorca,
trans. Aitana Alberti [
(33). See the article “Beloved Disciple” in the Encyclopedia
of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne
Dynes (New York: Garland, 1990).
(34). “Federico le
reprendió con asco esta tendencia bisexual suya [de José
María García Carrillo], puesto que él no aceptaba ninguna
sustitución de los hombres” (Gibson, Agustín
Penón, p. 116).
(35). Obras completas, 23
ed., II (Madrid: Aguilar, 1990), 1081.
(36). In my articles “Spain”, “Jews, Sephardic”,
“Granada”, “Juan II and Enrique IV”, and others in the Encyclopedia
of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne Dynes (New York: Garland, 1990), and in the
article “Homosexuality” in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of
Medieval Iberia, ed. Michael Gerli (New York: Garland), I presented
some of the evidence on this. There is much additional work to be done, and
some topics needing further research are outlined in “Research Topics in
Hispanic Gay and Lesbian Studies”, [MLA] Lesbian and Gay
Studies Newsletter, 18.2 (July, 1991), 1, 5-7; 18.3 (November, 1991),
27-30; 19.2 (July, 1992), 6-8; 19.3 (November, 1992), 7-11. [Available online
from http://bigfoot.com/~daniel.eisenberg]
So far it has not been possible to publish a
Spanish translation of the above articles. “
(37). I have reviewed both in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 65 (1988), 415-416. [Available online at http://bigfoot.com/~daniel.eisenberg]
(38). “Federico
García Lorca. Siete viñetas”, in his Cuatro lecciones
sobre Federico García Lorca (Madrid: Fundación Juan
March—Cátedra, 1980), pp. 11-36.
(39). The person who told me that she had recently seen the manuscript of Poeta en Nueva York, which was in the hands of a relative of hers, was Pilar Sáenz de García Ascot, Bergamín’s former secretary. She wrote me that, in her judgement, the help of “políticos” would be necessary. Her address in the mid-1970’s was Río Nazas, 73-5, 06500 Mexico D.F. She worked at the Institut Français d’Amérique Latine, Río Nazas, 43, México 5, D.F.
(40). On Martín’s edition, which I reviewed in Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, 8 (1983), 228-230 [available online at http://bigfoot.com/~daniel.eisenberg], see the discussions of Christopher Maurer, “Notes on the Poems” (note 25, above), pp. 259-267, and the introduction of María Clementa Millán, Poeta en Nueva York (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987). Millán has the fuller bibliography, although neither is exhaustive.
(41). Among other instances, such is the case of the Romancero gitano. García Posada, p. 694, mentions “copias, o autógrafos correspondientes a primeras redacciones, deben de existir en poder de diversos amigos del poeta, o de sus herederos. Llamo la atención sobre una posible primera redacción del ‘Romance de la guardia civil española’, conservada por los herederos de Ramón Ruiz de Peralta”. In his edition of Primer romancero gitano. Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (Madrid: Castalia, 1988), p. 78, he adds further references to these manuscripts; it is not clear if the “posible fragmento” of the “Romance de la guardia civil española” mentioned on p. 288 is the same. The MSS of many of Lorca’s published poems and drawings are today not to be found.
(42). “Papeles suyos
inéditos los hay a granel. No sólo en los archivos de la familia,
sino por todos lados. Lorca regalaba sus dibujos, manuscritos.... En la
Fundación García Lorca hay, creo, más de cien poemas
inéditos de Federico, de su primerísima época. No
conocemos todavía la primer Lorca. Yo quisiera que la Fundación,
de una vez por todas, diera a conocer cuanto antes ese material. Me parece
intolerable que no se haya publicado todavía, porque da pistas.”
(“Ian Gibson: ‘En 1986 lo sabemos casi todo sobre
Lorca’”, La vanguardia, 19 August 1986, p. 20.) Note
that Gibson has not been permitted access to this material held by the
allegedly open Fundación García Lorca. In 1987 he said “el año que viene
parece que la Fundación García Lorca va a publicarlos”
(“Ian Gibson: ‘Tras haber concluido la biografía de
García Lorca, creo que ya puedo morir tranquilo’”, La
vanguardia, November 10, 1987, reproduced in Boletín cultural,
December 1987, p. 73). He also specified that there were “más de
setenta poemas de juventud, una serie de prosas místicas donde Lorca indaga
en el terreno religioso-metafísico, unas obritas de teatro... [ellipsis in the original]. De modo que todavía no
conocemos a nuestro hombre.”
(43). “A pesar de nuestros
esfuerzos y gestiones, no hemos podido obtener del adquiridor que nos
facilitara una copia” (Suites, ed. André Belamich,
Barcelona: Ariel, 1983, p. 249). Also Eutimio Martín, “Un poema y
un dibujo inéditos de Federico García Lorca”, Ínsula,
380-381 (July-August, 1978), 1 and 24.
(44). “Poeta en Nueva
York”: Historia y problemas de un texto de Lorca, p. 185, n. 171.
(45). “Desde Estados
Unidos, Federico le escribió docenas de cartas apasionadas y por toda
respuesta el cabrón le mandó una postal de una montaña.
Emergiendo de uno de los picos de la mañana, había dibujado un
pene en erección” (Gibson, Agustín Penón, p.
107).
(46). “Lorca envió
un muchacho a Aleixandre con carta de presentación. Aleixandre,
inhibido, le mandó a Cernuda con la carta, y Cernuda se enamora con la
pasión que se expresará en Donde habite el olvido”
(told me by José Antonio Frías, June 21, 1991, who said his
source was his professor Luis García Montero).
(47). “Hay que pensar que haya cartas de Lorca a Buñuel, de Lorca a Blanco-Amor, etc.” (Gibson, “Tras haber concluido”.)
(48). “Other letters in the Lorca archives, many of which Gibson believed to be lost, will allow future biographers a more intimate look at the poets’ relation to his family: his letters to his parents (and theirs to him) during the triumphant visit to Buenos Aires; the letters home of his brother and two sisters; the hundreds of pages of juvenilia, much of it autobiographical, written in 1917-18” (Christopher Maurer, “The Black Pain” [review of Gibson’s biography], The New Republic, January 1, 1990, pp. 29-34, at p. 32).
(49). “Her frequent letters to her son, none of which Gibson was able to consult” (Christopher Maurer, p. 32).
(50). “Hay corresponsales
del poeta que no han proporcionado todos los textos que estaban dispuestos a
dar (Carlos Morla Lynch) o han decidido no dar ninguno (Rafael Martínez
Nadal)” (Antología comentada, ed. Eutimio Martín,
II, Madrid: De la Torre, 1989, 327).
(51). Juan Ramón
Masoliver, “Federico, siempre próximo en la distancia,” La
vanguardia, August 19, 1986, p. 21.
(52). “En un
artículo sobre la muerte de García Lorca escrito por un admirador
del fascista francés Robert Brasillach, se llegó a afirmar hace
algunos años que: ‘Existe una correspondencia entre Lorca y
José Antonio, y una carta del supuesto “Aragon español”
al jefe de la Falange empieza con “Mi gran amigo.”‘“
(Ian Gibson, En busca de José Antonio, Barcelona: Planeta, 1980,
p. 210.)
(53). Told to me by Juan de Loxa, director of the Casa-Museo García Lorca. One letter from Lorca to Rodríguez Valdivielso has been reproduced by the Casa-Museo on a postcard.
(54). “De 1921 y 1922 se
conserva un correspondencia intercambiada entre Madrid y Granada, donde se
trasluce el interés de Salazar en la formación y carrera de
Lorca. En este epistolario un entusiasmo desbordante por las obras y proyectos
del joven poeta se complementa con consejos sagaces—como de tío o
hermano mayor—sobre su vida y futuro.” (Andrew Anderson,
“Adolfo Salazar, el poeta forastero’: Una evocación olvidada
de Federico García Lorca,” Boletín de la
Fundación García Lorca, 4 [1988], 114-19, at p. 116.)
(55). “Terminada la
contienda, madrugué para rematar mi antología Las trescientas
con su “Oda al Santísimo Sacramento”, causante de que la
censura me la retuviera hasta el verano del 41.” (Juan Ramón
Masoliver, “Federico, siempre próximo en la distancia,” La
vanguardia, August 19, 1986, p. 21.)