Faber & Faber

Paul Binding - novelist, critic, poet and cultural historian - here provides a very personal explanation of his admiration of the work of Federica Garcia Lorca, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's greatest poets and playwrights.

Paul Binding writes:

My enthusiasm for the work of Federico García Lorca began in my schooldays when, keenly interested in new developments in the theatre, I bought a handsome New Directions (US) edition of Three Plays with an introduction by the great Spanish writer’s brother. Though Lorca had died in 1936, his dramatic works appeared excitingly and audaciously new even after more than twenty years. Together with the oeuvre of Brecht (who had died in 1956) and the ’50s experimental plays of Beckett, Ionesco and, right at the close of the decade, Pinter, they offered a challenge not only to the stifling conventions of the boulevard theatre but to the whole mindset which found those acceptable. I then discovered the Penguin bilingual edition of Lorca’s poems, edited and translated by J. L. Gili, and if anything was more moved still. As it happened, my acquaintance with this paperback volume was to lead to one of the many satisfying relationships with which Lorca is for me inextricably connected.

When I was an Oxford undergraduate, one of my closest friends was the later maker of documentary films, Jonathan Gili (1943-2004). His home was in Oxford, and his father none other than J. L. Gili himself, bookseller, publisher, editor, translator, and, though proudly Catalan, one of the main conduits through which Spanish writing gained a British readership. His eminent publisher family back in Spain had been, throughout the tragedy of the Civil War, at once united in private loyalties and divided in public ones. This made Joan Gili himself both an extremely sympathetic man and one ideally qualified to understand and render the humane, anti-doctrinaire ambiguities of Lorca. Joan Gili had, in fact, published two earlier volumes of Lorca translations in collaboration with Stephen Spender (The Hogarth Press’s Selected Poems of 1938 and 1943). My subsequent friendship with Stephen Spender, one of the most important of my whole life, enabled me, under his guidance and through countless conversations, to see Lorca in an ampler European context, as well as in an American one, centring on the whole great poem sequence, A Poet in New York.

My own involvement with Lorca, however, did not begin until 1979 when I wished to explore in depth a writer of major stature whose artistic achievements, widely saluted for their depth of insight and their cleansing innovations in literary form and language, were indissoluble from his homosexuality and - something, one still alas, bearing certain quarters in mind, has to add - his actual homosexual experience. Lorca’s own personal life was, in truth, marked by tremendous suffering on account of his sexuality; indeed it is possible to say that the authorities’ contemptuous knowledge of it contributed to his brutal, untimely death. Against a paradoxical background of increasing authoritarianism and social retrenchment in Britain and the United States (the governments of Thatcher and Reagan), a movement grew up determined to make clear the authenticity and moral rewards of honest homosexual relations. Of this the independent publishing house Gay Men’s Press was a key component, and they it was who commissioned from me my study of Lorca, which I subtitled ‘The Gay Imagination’.

The greater part of the work for it was done in Spain itself 1981-83. This was a time of great awakening in the country to the complexity of its history and of its immense and multi-stranded culture, and also to the need for any responsible society to acknowledge, confront and explore a range of human emotion and imaginings of which a regime like that of Franco went in punitive dread.  At times being in Spain then was like watching a princess awake from a long sleep. Heroes of the Spanish left and progressive arts returned to their own country for the first time - for example, Lorca’s friend, the poet  Rafael Alberti; Ian Gibson, thanks to whose patient researches the abominable truth of Lorca’s death was uncovered and the courage of his whole artistic career made clear, became not just an investigative outsider but a pundit of the pluralist new democracy. Madrid, where I lived, was both a liberated and a liberating city, and my life there was vibrant with intimate friendships. And Lorca’s gayness became more and more seen as worthy of interest and celebration. My study was the first book-length publication to examine his writing, with close attention to the text, specifically from the standpoint of his sexuality. Much has been done in this field since.

I stand by most of my book’s judgements, but - while in it my attitude to the subject is overt and even didactic in tone - I find Lorca’s reverence for the wantonly cruel bullfight even harder to take than I did. Respect for ancient ritual simply must have boundaries, and how the author of so much loving tribute to, and recreation of, the creature world (see Chapter Two, ‘The Inspirited Land’) could fail to feel outrage at such gratuitous infliction of pain is now quite beyond me. Members of the gay movements of the 70s and 80s, including my publishers and friends at GMP, were in the vanguard of ethical and empathic concern for animals, where I still try to position myself.