Untangling the facts from myths of life and murder of Spain’s greatest writer
BIOGRAPHY: Deep Song: The Life and World of Federico Garcia Lorca Stephen Roberts, Reaktion Books €29.99
In August 1936, not long after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Federico Garcia Lorca was shot dead by a firing squad of anti-Republican rebels. The remains of the 38-year-old Spanish poet and playwright were thrown into an unmarked mass grave; its precise location is still a mystery.
Most of the information we know about this topic is thanks to Ian Gibson’s 1979 book, The Assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca, which traced the politically motivated murder to a location near Viznar, a village in the Sierra de Huétor mountains above the city of Granada.
Dublin-born Gibson subsequently wrote a two-volume biography that included unpublished manuscripts and hundreds of intimate interviews with Lorca’s friends and family members.
Gibson is name-checked several times in Deep Song: The Life and World of Federico Garcia Lorca. Stephen Roberts’s book pales slightly in comparison to Gibson’s meticulously researched firstrate literary biography. Indeed, at times it seems as if Roberts is merely rehashing what other Lorca biographers have already written. But in other parts there is a swift, sharp style that gives the concise biography major appeal. It’s a good entry point to Lorca’s work.
Roberts also provides a nice mix of analytical theory on Lorca’s poems and plays alongside colourful kiss-and-tell gossip from Lorca’s adventurous, libidinous pursuits. Some caused more heartache and stress than others. An obsessional crush on Salvador Dali went on for many years, but Lorca could never quite sweet-talk the surrealist painter into bed.
Roberts begins where most conversations about Lorca tend to: with politics. He notes how the Franco regime spent four decades trying to distance itself from Lorca’s assassination. No country wants to openly admit to the international community that they wiped out their greatest writer with callous spiteful terror.
A 1965 Granada police report from which Roberts quotes gives some indication of how the rigid rules of far-right officialdom worked in fascist Spain. Lorca was guilty of no crime, but his sexual orientation and his liberal-leaning political views were deemed unforgivable misdemeanours by some. Orders were thus barked down the chain of command to kill him.
Tragic and all as this tale is, Roberts believes it oversimplifies most conversations about Lorca’s life in the public domain: they typically move beyond art and literature and into the dogmatic creeds of civil-war politics. And Lorca quickly becomes either Christ or the devil, depending on one’s political persuasion.
To hardcore Franco loyalists, Lorca was a poisonous symbol of everything they felt was rotten about the Republic: a decadent cosmopolitan who openly turned his back on the values of conservative Catholic Spain.
Lorca’s close friends, Republican poets like Antonio Machado and Pablo Neruda, did everything they could to turn Lorca into a martyr for the internationalist left, while tirelessly painting him as a victim of global fascism.
But life is never that simple. And artists don’t possess the dedicated tribal allegiances that politicians do. Roberts claims that Lorca’s loyalties were never quite as clear-cut as the posthumous narrative suggests.
Lorca once claimed to have a different personal greeting depending on what friends he met with: some received the fascist salute, others the clenched fist of international socialism, and a close select group were simply embraced with open arms.
Another interview Roberts quotes from (via Gibson) claims that Lorca wanted the Nationalists to win the war and he was a conservative at heart.
Such accusations are hard to prove. But we do know that Lorca publicly always showed more loyalty to the Republican left. Ever the complex character, though, Lorca never fully turned away from the conservative elements in Spanish society that eventually sent him to an early grave.
This complicated story stems from Lorca’s family background. He was the son of an extremely wealthy rural landowner. Lorca’s father supported his son financially almost to the very end of his life.
The family stipend Lorca regularly received helped him travel to the United States, Cuba and Argentina. Those trips inspired and informed Lorca’s work. They also helped build a global audience and furthered his career considerably, as both a dramatist and poet.
Lorca always detested certain elements of his bourgeois Catholic background. The rigid, narrowminded moral mores particularly made his blood boil. But other elements of it were useful.
It gave the good life to Lorca on a plate. It also shaped him spiritually and intellectually.
The mystical landscape, customs, traditions and rituals of Andalusian life ironically gave Lorca an enormous awareness of his own death: a topic he never stopped talking and writing about until the end finally arrived.
It came suddenly and violently with a bullet in the back of his head.