Lorca - A Dream of Life by Leslie Stainton Bloomsbury 487, £30 in UK
In death, Federico Garcia Lorca came to symbolise the martyrdom of Spain. It was a fate no one could have predicted for a pampered man with little interest in politics. Murdered at the age of thirty-eight, during the first weeks of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca in life epitomised the notion of the artist as a complex misfit, a natural solitary who craved companionship, adored attention and searched in vain for love.
Now, in the final weeks of his surprisingly muted centenary year, comes Leslie Stainton's atmospheric study. At nearly five hundred pages this is a big book, and it achieves its objective, in evoking, examining and attempting to explain its subject, an exciting poet, a provincial and a cosmopolitan, whose four major plays reveal astonishingly perceptive depths of characterisation, particularly of female characters.
Nine years have passed since the Irish writer Ian Gibson published the first full-length biography of this colourful enigma, much of whose mystery, admittedly, is rooted in his grotesque death. The two books are very different. Gibson approached his subject through a fascination with the bizarre circumstances of his murder. Stainton's work, which she had begun writing some five years before Gibson's was published, differs greatly; she is in pursuit of the man rather than his murderers.
Unobtrusive yet sympathetic, she makes no excuses for Lorca's selfish, often egotistical behaviour, yet she does not miss the essentially childlike - and childish - quality of his personality. If there is a key to this strange character, who invariably saw himself as a victim and whose moods swung between joy and despair, it could be the social privilege which protected and spoilt him.
Unlike other young men of his generation, Lorca never went to war. Indeed, for all his emotional unhappiness, he was to suffer few hardships. Born the eldest son of a wealthy and kindly father whom he loved, Lorca enjoyed a pampered childhood which, Stainton points out, he was later to be embarrassed by. However, if this is true, it then becomes difficult to accept the fact that Lorca allowed his parents to support him until he was well into his thirties. He was a natural performer and his musical talents manifested themselves even before his literary ones.
While a no-hope university student, he published Impressions and Landscapes, his first book. Publication was paid for by his father. According to a friend, quoted by Stainton, Lorca remained a combination of "strength and weakness, country boy and decadent youth". And she points out that he was at his happiest when being the life and soul of the party. "His daily life was a performance. He constantly sought new audiences to mirror his thoughts, to provoke and encourage his creativity, to fuel his sense of importance, to stave off loneliness." The fact that Lorca finally completed a degree after spending nine years at university is more a tribute to the determination of his parents than to his own diligence.
Having begun work in the shadows cast over Spain and its history by Franco's dictatorship, Gibson may have found his sources seriously limited. Stainton's book benefits from the number of voices heard in it. Apparently she had access to more than a hundred recently discovered letters. These documents, and other material, including interviews, cast more light on Lorca: he emerges as a three-dimensional character. His changing attitudes and opinions are shrewdly chronicled, as is his altering physical appearance. The boy-faced man who kept his youthful looks for most of his short life developed heavy jowls and lines during his final years.
For all his ego and boyish bragging to his parents, the young Lorca was shrewd enough to know that his poems would have a greater impact on his friends if performed by him than they might enjoy on the page. Stainton records his response to being asked why he insisted on reading his poems aloud. "To defend them," replied the poet. Surrendering a poem to a magazine or journal was done, he said, "with a sense of rupture and a secret repugnance, like a mother who sends her son off to the army".
This book works hard at capturing the various faces and moods of Lorca: the poet; the musician, of whom the composer Manuel de Falla said on hearing him play a Debussy prelude that he was an artist whose "love of music and powers of invention" rivalled his own; the dramatist who would bravely confront the social and sexual injustices of his society. At no time does she confer heroic grandeur on him; in fact, she presents a nervy man who was frightened of many things, including fast taxis and even the business of crossing the street. Nor does she present him as misjudged. Many people were charmed by Garcia Lorca. He seems to have been as loving to his parents as they were indulgent of him.
Because of the wealth of outside quotation the author can call upon, this quiet, responsible work is never forced. She does not indulge in speculation or presume to enter her subject's mind. Her style is modest, there is little dazzle, but what is abundantly clear is the unpretentious intelligence of her approach. It is Lorca's story, and it is also that of his Spain. As for his work, Stainton proves a perceptive reader who is clearly more comfortable with the plays than the poetry. All of her readings are valid, and it is particularly good to see the importance she places on his Chekhovian masterpiece, Dona Rosita the Spinster, one of the great plays of European theatre.
Above all, by refusing to eulogise Lorca she makes her case for his status as a great writer all the stronger. Perhaps time has made it easier to discuss the relevance of his homosexuality, but Stainton proves to be the best so far on this aspect of his personality. Sensible and sensitive, this is a book of voices, the central one being that of Lorca himself. Biography has become a messy, dishonourable pursuit. This maligned genre, however, has been somewhat redeemed by Leslie Stainton's valuable, insightful book about a mercurial genius who died knowing his best work would be left undone.