LORCA, BUÑUEL, DALÍ § Gwynne Edwards was until recently Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, specialising in theatre and fi lm. He has written extensively on Lorca, Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar. His translations of Lorca’s plays, as well as those of seventeenth-century and modern South American dramatists, have been published by Methuen, and many have been staged professionally. LORCA, BUÑUEL, DALÍ § Forbidden Pleasures and Connected Lives G E WYNNE DWARDS Published in 2009 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2009 Gwynne Edwards The right of Gwynne Edwards to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Quotations from the Spanish-language works by Federico García Lorca © Herederos de Federico García Lorca from Obras completas (Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores, Barcelona/Valencia, 1996 edition). Translations by Gwynne Edwards © Herederos de Federico García Lorca and Gwynne Edwards. All rights reserved. For information please contact William Peter Kosmas at [email protected] Quotations from My Last Breath by Luis Buñuel, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of the Random House Group, Ltd. Quotations from The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, published by Vision Press, 1968. In all cases every effort has been made to contact the publishers in question. Photographs are by kind permission of the Fundación Federico García Lorca, Madrid (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12); the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueras (3); Contemporary Films, Ltd. (8, 9), and the Filmoteca, Madrid (15, 16). All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 978 1 84885 007 1 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd, www.jcs-publishing.co.uk Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 1 Childhood 9 2 Adolescence 27 3 The Residencia de Estudiantes 51 4 Changing Partners 77 5 Surrealism 105 6 Politics and Sex 135 7 Descent into Chaos 157 8 The Outbreak of War 181 9 After Lorca 203 Conclusion 231 Select Bibliography 235 Index 239 ILLUSTRATIONS 1 Lorca in Granada in 1919, aged twenty-one 54 2 Lorca and Luis Buñuel at the Residencia de Estudiantes, 1922 57 3 Salvador Dalí in Cadaqués, 1927 79 4 Lorca and Salvador Dalí in Cadaqués, 1927 81 5 Lorca and Emilio Aladrén in Madrid, 1928 92 6 Lorca walking with friends in New York 94 7 Lorca with two children, Stanton and Mary Hogan in Bushnellsville, United States, 1929 97 8 The slicing of the eyeball in Buñuel and Dalí’s Un chien andalou, 1929 110 9 The force of passion in Buñuel and Dalí’s L’Age d’or, 1930 119 10 Lorca’s production with La Barraca of Calderón’s Life is a Dream, 1932 138 11 Production of Lorca’s Yerma, directed by Cipriano Rivas Cherif, at the Teatro Espanõl, Madrid, 1934 163 12 Production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding, directed by Cipriano Rivas Cherif, at the Teatro Principal Palace, Barcelona, 1935, with Margarita Xirgu as the Mother 174 13 Production of Lorca’s Doña Rosita the Spinster, at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, 1989 207 14 The wedding guests in the production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding, directed by Anthony Clark, at Contact Theatre, Manchester, 1987 208 15 The bourgeoisie at home (at dinner) in Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, 1962 224 16 Bourgeois consternation in Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972 227 INTRODUCTION § FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA (1898–1936), Luis Buñuel (1900–83), and Salvador Dalí (1904–89) are without doubt three of the greatest and best-known Spanish creative artists of the twentieth century. Lorca’s poetry and, in particular, plays such as Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba are universally acknowledged for their emotional and dramatic force and have been translated into many languages. The name of Luis Buñuel appears regularly in the list of the most accomplished fi lm directors in the history of the cinema, especially in relation to Surrealism. And Salvador Dalí is, of course, recognised throughout the world not only for his extraordinary surrealist paintings, but also for his quite bizarre and often sensational way of life. But if these three individuals are known for their own particular work and have each been the subject of various exhaustive studies, the connections between them, which are many and varied, have rarely been considered. In the following pages, titles of their works will be given in English except when these works are normally known by their non-English titles. In these cases, the foreign title will be followed by an English translation. Born within six years of each other, they came from different parts of Spain: Lorca from the colourful and vibrant south, Buñuel from the much harsher northern province of Aragón, and Dalí from the coastal town of Figueras on the Costa Brava. But if their places of origin differed, their childhood circumstances were very similar, for all three enjoyed privileged backgrounds, markedly different from the poverty endured by many others in those regions of Spain. Lorca’s father was, as we shall see, a prosperous farmer who owned a considerable amount of land and employed many 2 LORCA, BUÑUEL, DALÍ agricultural workers. Buñuel’s father, having made his fortune in Cuba, owned two luxurious properties, and was so wealthy that on one occasion he was able to save a local bank from insolvency. And Dalí’s father, although not quite in the same fi nancial category as Buñuel’s, was a well-known notary whose duties brought in a regular and considerable income. It was precisely on account of their privileged backgrounds that Lorca and Buñuel especially felt compassion for those less well-off than themselves and that later on they shared markedly left-wing views that would in turn profoundly affect their personal lives. Dalí too held extreme left- wing views as a young man; they were more a refl ection of his father’s own anarchist views than anything else, but it seems quite clear that when Lorca, Buñuel, and Dalí became close friends in the 1920s, they shared a similar political viewpoint. A second and highly important connection concerns their sexuality. If this issue is dealt with extensively in the following pages, it is simply because it was something that played a crucial part in the personal and artistic lives of all three individuals, defi ning their relationships and expressing itself throughout their work. It is often argued that the personal lives of creative artists have little connection with their work, but there are clearly many whose plays, fi lms, paintings, or music are the expression of their anguish and anxieties, and of whom it is safe to say that without those emotional problems that work would not exist. Tchaikovsky would not have produced his last symphony, the so-called Pathétique, had he not been plunged into deep despair. Nor would Strindberg or Tennessee Williams have written the plays they did had their personal lives not been marked by sexual, marital, and family traumas. Lorca and Buñuel’s sexuality was profoundly infl uenced by their Catholic background, and in Buñuel’s case by his education by Jesuits. Although Lorca attended a fairly liberal school, the highly traditional and strongly Catholic society in which he grew up meant that his increasing awareness of his homosexual leanings created in him a crisis of conscience, a need to conceal his sexual nature from his family and others, and, in consequence, it led to a profound sexual frustration that would subsequently characterise most of his work.1 Buñuel’s exposure at school to the strict teachings of the Jesuits left him – as it did many other Spaniards who attended similar institutions – with the deeply ingrained belief that sex