Can you believe Lorca wrote those lines?
I have a much better sense of him now, after watching this documentary, made 40 years ago. August 19 marks the 90th anniversary of his execution, which is a wound that will never close in this country. Nobody would want it to either.
They have indeed never found Lorca’s bones, despite three major excavations, and his family wants him to stay with the other bones, until everybody can be raised and buried properly. They don’t want him to get special treatment.
Lorca suffered from melancholic depression, and sided with people who in one way or another were being put down.
“He was not interested in political socialism,” says one old friend, in the film, from his painful Columbia University days.
I think his stark horror of New York, from his time there in 1929-1930, was fascinating.
”New York seems horrible, but for that very reason I’m going there,” he wrote to a friend, Carlos Morla Lynch. “I think I’ll have a very good time.”
“Besides black art, there us only automation and mechanization,” he also wrote, of New York.
In Granada, it’s hard to find him, because he’s everywhere—but this film helped me begin to get a feel for him at last.
It makes me acutely sad to think of him in that car in the early morning hours, being driven to the countryside to be shot. Just like all the others.
Unimaginable.
I wrote a whole article about it earlier tonight but will have to revisit it tomorrow.
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