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THE LITERARY VIEW Skyscraper Blues: Federico Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York BY DAN CALLAHAN Photos courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux House of Bernarda Alba” and “Blood Wedding,” the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca first came to prominence as a poet. His poetry collection “Gypsy Ballads,” published in 1928, was warmly received both in Spain and abroad, but Lorca bridled against being typecast. “The gypsies are a theme,” he wrote. “And nothing more. I could just as well be a poet of sewing needles or hydraulic landscapes.” In June of 1929, Lorca sailed for America, where he would stay in New York as a student at Columbia University. During his New York visit, he visited Harlem, saw the Stock Market crash, and wrote a book of poems, “Poet in New York,” which would the verse about Wall Street, where such negativity might be expected. His poem about a visit to Coney Island is called “Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude.” This is what he sees in a poem called “Dawn”: Dawn in New York has four columns of mire and a hurricane of black pigeons splashing in the putrid waters Dawn in New York groans On enormous fire escapes searching between the angles for spikenards of drafted anguish his rather strange and conflicted “Ode to Walt Whitman,” which is less of an ode to Whitman and more of an anguished plea for some kind of selfunderstanding. Many of the drawings by Lorca that preface some of these poems are delightful, but a lecture he gave on his New York stay, which is included here, feels almost comically at odds with the much more cheery version of his trip that he gives to his Lorca, who was homosexual, was very close to Salvador Dali, so intensely involved, in fact, that Dali finally had to distance himself from the older poet’s ardor. Luis Buñuel took a dim view of Lorca, and Lorca himself felt that Buñuel’s joint film with Dali, “Un Chien Andalou” (1928), was an attack on his person. “Buñuel has made a little shit of a film called ‘An Andalusian Dog,’ and the ‘Andalusian dog’ is me,” Lorca told his friend Ángel del Río. The influence of Dali’s surrealism on Lorca’s poetry in “Poet in New York” is clear, and the results can be felicitous. These poems are filled with unexpected combinations of descriptive words and images: only be published after his murder in 1936 at the hands of a Nationalist militia in Spain. “Poet in New York” was first put out in 1939 and 1940 in Britain and the US. It has seen several translations since, and now this very handsome new bilingual edition from Farrar, Straus and Giroux that also includes some newly translated letters that Lorca wrote to his family. “Poet in New York” has not always had a positive press. It was thought anti-American by some when it was first published, and it remains a very thorny, almost wholly ambivalent work. Many of the poems do look at Manhattan in a negative way, and not just If it isn’t the birds covered with ash if it isn’t the sobbing that strikes the windows of the wedding it is the delicate creatures of the air that spill fresh blood in the inextinguishable darkness I love the combination of “inextinguishable” with “darkness,” and I love when Lorca references the “blue horse of my insanity.” So many of these images have a dreamlike rightness to them. That isn’t always the case when he tries to make a naïve but heartfelt plea for African Americans in “Standards and Paradise of the Blacks,” or mother in his letters home. Lorca was an artist who was always being violently torn between thoughts, emotions and positions, and this violence sometimes resulted in the hand-in-glove beauty of some of his poems and his great plays and sometimes led to some of the work in this book, which is a bit like hearing someone hit a piano hard to make a lot of discordant sound. “I badly want to communicate with you,” Lorca says in his New York lecture. “Not to give you honey (I have none) but sand or hemlock or salt water. Hand-to-hand fighting, and it does not matter if I am defeated.” REVOLT <strong>Magazine</strong> Number 4, 2013 30
THE LITERARY VIEW Cherchez la femme: James Salter's All That Is BY DAN CALLAHAN Very few living American writers can be said to have been influenced by Ernest Hemingway, but 87 year-old James Salter wears that laconic style like a badge of honor. Compared to contemporaries like John Updike, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer or Philip Roth, he has written comparatively few novels and has not yet won a wide readership. Salter’s two masterpieces, “A Sport and a Pastime” (1967) and “Light Years” (1975), met with little understanding when they were first published, but they will surely survive long after more lauded novels of that time have faded away. Every sentence in Salter’s work is a discrete and burnished object, lovingly screwed into place for maximum impact yet also cryptic and elusive. His oblique way of writing, which he has perfected over many years practice, has allowed him to create some of the most evocative literary sex scenes of all time. Salter’s new novel, “All That Is,” is studded with sex scenes, lofty descriptions that exalt sex as a be-all and endall of life, and this attitude is not without its disturbing implications. His narrative voice is a mix of tough guy and dandy, man’s man and unrepentant hedonist; he’s like a tour guide of pleasure, letting his loose narrative wander into minutely considered digressions on favored writers, succulent meals or the very fine cut of a suit. Salter’s cloudiness mirrors that of his novel’s protagonist, Philip Bowman, a literary man, a man of the world and a gentleman of publishing who learns notably little throughout his long life. The book opens with a foreboding chapter which briefly details Bowman’s experience in the navy during World War II, twelve pages that take in memories of some of his crewmates and a girl from this war period, Vicky Hollins, who sounds like a Howard Hawks heroine: “Vicky Hollins in her silk dress, the glances clinging to her as she passed. In heels she wasn’t that short. She liked to call herself by her last name. It’s Hollins, she would announce on the phone.” Just four short sentences, and you can see and hear Vicky Hollins, this 1940s dream girl; though she is never seen or heard of again in the novel, she is its talisman, its goal, the woman that Philip Bowman will look for all his life. Moving from the beauty of women, Salter sketches the enormous brutality of war in a single paragraph, describing what happens to the men on a sinking ship as most of them get sucked into a whirlpool and drown. In the clear-eyed yet stunned way that Salter tells it, even this nightmarish scene has a kind of remembered grandeur. “All That Is” goes on to describe Bowman’s encounters with women throughout his life. He falls in love with the upper class blond Vivian and imagines a life with her: “He saw himself tumbled with her among the bedclothes and fragrance of married life, the meals and holidays of it, the shared rooms, the glimpses of her half-dressed, her blondness, the pale hair where her legs met, the sexual riches that would be there forever.” The adolescent-minded Bowman, however, does not realize that Vivian is a limited girl who is totally unsuitable to the life he wants her to lead in New York—she leaves him after a time and he can’t understand why. Bowman then goes on to several affairs, usually with married women, and Salter describes with relish the enraptured beginnings of these affairs as well as the amours of Bowman’s colleague Eddins. The imagery this writer uses to describe the sex his people have is sometimes so sumptuously apt that it doesn’t make you horny so much as it makes you want to stand up and applaud him. Here is how Salter describes Eddins being fellated by his future wife Dena: “It was like a boot just slipped onto a full calf and she went on doing it, gaining assurance, her mouth making only a faint sound.” And then later on: “Her buttocks were glorious, it was like being in a bakery, and when she cried out it was like a dying woman, one that had crawled to a shrine.” Here is Salter’s description of Bowman with his juicy English lover Enid Armour: “He gathered and went in slowly, sinking like a ship, a little cry escaping her, the cry of a hare, as it went to the hilt.” That phrase “sinking like a ship” reads ominously after the actual ship sinking in the first chapter—though the experience of World War II is sketched in only a few pages at the beginning of this book, it seems to drive all of the behavior of the men here who had served and somehow come through, which serves as another link to Hemingway’s work. “All That Is” is tricky to read when it comes to how it portrays its women. It’s hard to tell, sometimes, if they are being seen only from Bowman’s point of view or if they represent how Salter himself sees them. The female characters in this book are looked on as enigmatic sexual baubles, lovely to physically possess while they are still attractive but sadly on the shelf as they age (the fate of an older Enid Armour after she loses her looks is laid out in a chilling page and a half set in a restaurant where she drinks too much and makes a fool of herself). The women in “All That Is” have no life of their own unrelated to men, and you can say that that is Bowman’s problem but it is also a problem in the book itself. Salter sees so many things so clearly, from a distance, but he is too buttoned-up and traditional to try to imagine anything from deep inside a woman’s point of view. “All That Is” is a novel filled to brimming with piercing little vignettes of isolated people, both men and women, and it is Salter’s rare talent that he only needs a line or two, sometimes, to make a person come to life with dawning clarity. If there is any writer he resembles, finally, it is not Hemingway or the macho cohort that came after him but Isak Dinesen, a woman who made an art out of nostalgia. Like her, Salter sees everything through a glass darkly, and what he shows us is troubling but mouthwateringly sensual and essential.
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