Vol. 21 No. 7 · 1 April 1999
pages 27-28 | 2952 words
I’m not a happy poet
John Butt
- Lorca: A Dream of Life by Leslie Stainton
Bloomsbury, 568 pp, £20.00, November 1998, ISBN 0 7475 4128 0
In Argentina in 1933, so Leslie Stainton tells us, Lorca ‘began wearing a white linen suit, and frequently a white cotton sailor’s shirt with a V-shaped neck and a dark sash. He took childlike delight in donning the shirt and going to the beach to “awaken” the seashells by calling out to them.’ He was obviously someone to be taken only in tiny doses. It is also clear that this poet and playwright, talented pianist, cartoonist and painter, raconteur and wit, noted reciter of verse, theatrical director, mimic, sporadic literary theorist, occasional conjuror and luminary of Madrid’s cafés, presents a classic case of the life’s work threatened with eclipse by the life itself.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 9 · 29 April 1999
From Harry Bugler
John Butt lists the diverse handicaps experienced by the poets who were Lorca's contemporaries (LRB, 1 April). Poor Jorge Guillén was cursed with 'uncomplicated heterosexuality and a lack of interest in politics'. What other characteristics would now debar an artist from admission to the élite? Perhaps regular bowel movements and an interest in snooker.
Harry Bugler
Ballinasloe, Co. Galway
From Ian Gibson
John Butt attributes to me a work entitled Federico García Lorca, published in 1985. This is misleading. In 1985 Editorial Grijalbo in Barcelona brought out the first volume of my biography, Federico García Lorca: De Fuente Vaqueros a Nueva York (1898-1929). The second volume, Federico García Lorca: De Nueva York a Fuente Grande (1929-36), appeared in 1987. In 1989 Faber published my much reduced English version of the book, Federico García Lorca: A Life, to which Butt is clearly referring. By silencing all mention of the original Spanish edition, and giving the reader to understand that the biography first came out in 1985, in English, he does me, unintentionally no doubt, a grave disservice. He says, for example, that Leslie Stainton's new biography 'contains some details missing from Gibson's Federico García Lorca (1985), among them a 'titbit from one quidnunc who caught Lorca in his underpants with a naked Luis Cernuda in 1931'. This episode, both amusing and revealing, is recounted in the second volume of the Spanish edition of my biography. Again, in commenting on Lorca's political views, Butt adduces an incident relating to the poet's alleged friendship with the Fascist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera, which he says I 'chose to omit'. The incident is discussed, though, not only in my book on the latter (En busca de José Antonio, 1980), as Butt says, but in the second volume of the Spanish edition of my Lorca biography.
Ian Gibson
Restábal, Granada
