Piecing Together Lorca’s Time in Interwar America

‘Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover’By Patricia A. BillingsleyHigh Road Books, 232 pages“I won’t be able to complain / though I never found what I was looking for,” are the first lines of a poem translated as “Living Sky,” by Federico García Lorca, and part of his celebrated collection “Poet in New York.” The poem is set, however, in Vermont and exactly what the poet is looking for, and why he can’t complain. is precisely what Patricia A. Billingsley brilliantly explains.At the time of the poem’s composition, Lorca was spending ten days with his lover, the American poet, Philip Cummings, a student of Spanish literature. The two had met in Spain and developed an intimacy that for decades remained a secret, then a vaguely recognized pairing that only now has been delicately deciphered in a biography as detective story.In 1929, Lorca, already celebrated as Spain’s greatest young poet, came to America speaking no English. Cummings, fluent in Spanish and devoted to Lorca’s work, became his first American translator, working closely with the poet over several intense days. Although Cummings’s translations have been faulted, they are invaluable because of Lorca’s collaboration. Knowing who Cummings was makes the provenance of several poems apparent, as well as Cummings’s role as Lorca’s occluded subject,That it has taken so long to probe the full dimensions of “Poet in New York” has to do, in part, with Lorca’s homosexuality, which he embraced but also had to carefully protect. His execution by Franco’s forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War had to do not only with his art but with his sexual orientation. His family and close friends carefully tended to his legacy, but the full story of what kind of man he was, and what Cummings meant to him, has only gradually been pieced together in Ms. Billingsley’s two decades of work.The biographer has some letters between the two lovers to interpret, but she candidly identifies the gaps, and supplies suggestive explanations, usually with the proviso that much still cannot be known. At certain points, though, she succumbs to the penchant of biographers, eager to fill the void of evidence, with what they feel “must have” happened, when, in fact, the “must have” is really “I don’t know.”Here is why “must have” is the bane of biography. Ms. Billingsley evocatively describes Lorca’s trepidation at having to travel by himself from New York to meet Cummings in Vermont:“For a late riser like Federico, waking up that early would have been a real challenge, but fortunately conductors kept track of each person’s itinerary. They typically woke travelers up well in advance of their arrival time, so no one was likely to sleep through their destination. Still, Federico must have been barely awake as he followed the other passengers up the covered stairway from the platform, across the elevated bridge, and into the spacious central hall of Burlington’s Union Station.”To say he was “barely awake,” sounds plausible enough, yet who knows? Might the anxiety have kept Lorca from sleeping at all? Or once awake, was he—in spite of his usual habits—on high alert? Did a conductor actually wake him as was “typically” done? What the biographer thinks she knows cannot in the moment by moment experience of a life be resolved by a “must have.”So much for fastidious quibbling. What is far more important is Ms. Billingsley’s nuanced depiction of the two lovers. Lorca had overwhelming desire to discover a life partner. Cummings seemed to promise so much, but then disappointed the poet because for all his lack of inhibition, Cummings was circumspect about his homosexuality and planned on marrying — in effect, hiding part of himself and forcing Lorca in a way to do the same, as “Living Sky” declares: He would not be able to complain; he is grieving over not finding what he was looking for.Ms. Billingsley couples her astute interpretations of Lorca’s poems with the biographical evidence, with, for example, Cummings’s memory of how much Lorca liked to joke and yet, in another instance, was overcome by sadness. What Lorca lived is in “Living Sky,” and its resonance is all the more moving because of the biographer’s profound knowledge of her subjects and her sensitivity.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography.”

Piecing Together Lorca’s Time in Interwar America

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