Lorca's ‘Agonía republicana’ and Its Aftermath

Abstract

The afterlives of Federico García Lorca are many. His violent death at the hands of the extreme right during the Civil War has been remembered and imagined in a variety of ways, thus bringing the Republican poet back to life in a strange kind of afterglow and symbolically completing his earthly trajectory. Republicans naturally claimed him for their own cause, but surprisingly, a few on the right made similar title to Lorca. I focus on that claim as part of the aftermath of the poet's death, re-examining some of the early right-wing reaction to Lorca's assassination, subsequent commentary, and one especially pertinent case, that of the South African poet, Roy Campbell. The aim is to shed more light on the motivation or circumstances that produced such claims and on the ideological contentiousness that so politicised Lorca's life and work.

Key words:

• Lorca's assassination
• Roy Campbell

Notes

1 Leslie Stainton, Lorca: A Dream of Life (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999), 425–26. My warm thanks to Wan Tang and Daniel García-Donoso for their assistance in locating some of the source materials used here.

2 See Ian Gibson's classic study for these and other details of the poet's death: The Assassination of Federico García Lorca (London: Penguin, 1983).

3 See also Miguel Caballero Pérez, for the identification of the firing squad as filled with Assault Guards: Las trece últimas horas en la vida de García Lorca, prol. Emilio Ruiz Barrachina (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2011), Ch. IX.

4 Luis Hurtado Álvarez, ‘A la España imperial le han asesinado su mejor poeta’, Falange Auténtica, 18 October 2008 [originally 1937], <http://jarabeautentico.blogspot.ie/2008/10/federico-garca-lorca-en-nuestra-memoria.html> (accessed 6 April 2012); reprinted in Antorcha (Antequera) 16, 28 March 1937, n.p.; Voz de las CONS, 5 April 1937, p. 4 (CONS stands for Central Obrera Nacional Sindicalista, a Falangist organization for the working classes). For more on the Nationalist reaction to Lorca's death, see: Gibson, The Assassination of Federico García Lorca, Ch. 14; Kessel Schwartz, ‘Culture and the Spanish Civil War—A Fascist View: 1936–1939’, Journal of Inter-American Studies, 7:4 (1965), 557–77 (p. 569); Laura Dolfi, Il caso García Lorca: dalla Spagna all'Italia (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2006).

5 A Falangist slogan originally coined by jonsista Ramiro Ledesma Ramos; see Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval, José Antonio (biografía apasionada), 3^rd rev. ed. (Madrid: Editorial Bullón, 1963 [1^st ed. 1941]), 140, n. 1; Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 100.

6 Antonio Sánchez Barbudo [S.B.], ‘La muerte de García Lorca comentada por sus asesinos’, Hora de España, 5 (Mayo 1937), 391–92 (p. 392).

7 Sánchez Barbudo, ‘La muerte de García Lorca’, 392; Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval, Camisa azul (Retrato de un falangista) (Valladolid: Librería Santarén, 1939), 42.

8 Sánchez Barbudo, ‘La muerte de García Lorca’, 392; Catálogo general de los fondos documentales de la Fundación Federico García Lorca, ed. Christian de Paepe 7 vols (Madrid: Consejería de Cultura de la Junta de Andalucía/Fundación Federico García Lorca, 2003), VI, Catálogo de la correspondencia a Federico García Lorca, 242–43; Isabel García Lorca, Recuerdos míos, ed. Ana Gurruchaga, prol. Claudio Guillén, 2^nd ed. (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2002), 182–83.

9 Falange Auténtica, 18 October 2008, <http://jarabeautentico.blogspot.ie/2008/10/federico-garca-lorca-en-nuestra-memoria.html> (accessed 28 November 2011).

10 Nemesio Sabugo Gallego, Benavides. Episodio español transcendente, prol. Emilio Sáez (León: Ediciones Leonesas, 1989), 11–12, 173.

11 The document is reproduced in Eduardo Molina Fajardo, Los últimos días de García Lorca (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1983), 385–86.

12 The Army did not shoot Lorca, though there is strong evidence to suggest that General Queipo de Llano also played a role in his murder.

13 Francisco Villena's 1937 article is reprinted in José María García de Tuñón Aza, José Antonio y los poetas, prol. Eduardo López Pascual (Madrid: Plataforma 2003, 2003), 67–69.

14 Villena, ‘De una historia que vio la Alhambra’, in José Antonio y los poetas, prol. López Pascual, 67.

15 Edwin Rolfe, ‘A Federico García Lorca’, in The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War, ed. Cary Nelson (Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002), 192.

16 Villena, ‘De una historia que vio la Alhambra’, in José Antonio y los poetas, prol. López Pascual, 68.

17 Villena, ‘De una historia que vio la Alhambra’, in José Antonio y los poetas, prol. López Pascual, 68; for seed imagery see Noël Valis, Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2010), 203.

18 Juan Cano Ballesta, Las estrategias de la imaginación. Utopías literarias y retórica política bajo el franquismo (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1994), 27–38.

19 On the Falangist rhetoric of the soldier/poet see Mechthild Albert, Vanguardistas de camisa azul: la trayectoria de los escritores Tomás Borrás, Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval, Samuel Ros y Antonio de Obregón entre 1925 y 1940, trans. Cristina Díez Pampliega y Juan Ramón García Ober (Madrid: Visor, 2003), 423.

20 Juan Antonio Ríos Carratalá, Una arrolladora simpatía. Edgar Neville: de Hollywood al Madrid de la posguerra (Barcelona: Ariel, 2007), 20.

21 Francisco Ortiz Lozano, ‘Federico García Lorca y los falangistas’, Falange Auténtica, 26 September 2005, <http://www.falange-autentica.org/categorias/cultura/538-federico-garcia-lorca-y-los-falangistas> (accessed 15 September 2009).

22 Eutimio Martín, ‘La “vis comica” de la poesía falangista’, Cahiers d’Études Romanes, 6 (1980), 125–44 (pp. 139–40).

23 Abelardo Clariana, ‘Un absurdo intento de romancero faccioso’, Hora de España, 18 (June 1938), pp. 282–83 (p. 283).

24 Agustín de Foxá, Madrid, de corte a checa, 3^rd ed. (Madrid: Prensa Española, 1962 [1^st ed. 1938]), 141.

25 Martín, ‘La “vis comica” de la poesía falangista’, 139, 143, n. 23 cites from a religious poem titled ‘Por aquel huerto de olivas’, attributed to José María de Iruna and published in the Falangist-oriented Fotos, 5, 27 March 1937, which I have not been able to see. Evidently the same poem, with the title ‘Las cruces de los cordeles’, written by P. Iglesias Caballero, appeared before the war in Blanco y Negro, 5 April 1936, p. 75.

26 Ximénez de Sandoval, Camisa azul, 179–90.

27 José Antonio Primo de Rivera, ‘Discurso de la fundación de Falange Española’, 29 October 1933, <http://www.retoricas.com/2009/06/discurso-jose-antonio-primo-de-rivera.html> (accessed 22 June 2009).

28 Hurtado Álvarez, <http://jarabeautentico.blogspot.ie/2008/10/federico-garca-lorca-en-nuestra-memoria.html> (accessed 15 June 2009); García de Tuñón Aza, José Antonio y los poetas, 64–66; José Luis Alcocer, Radiografía de un fraude: notas para una historia del Frente de Juventudes (Barcelona: Planeta, 1978), 118. Ian Gibson, however, is highly sceptical of the supposed Lorca-Primo de Rivera friendship: En busca de José Antonio (Barcelona: Planeta, 1980), 214–21; see also Ximénez de Sandoval, José Antonio, 349, 427.

29 Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977, 106.

30 Ximénez de Sandoval, Camisa azul, 396; Rafael García Serrano, Diccionario para un macuto, 4^th ed. (Barcelona: Planeta, 1979), 506–08 (also Ximénez de Sandoval, José Antonio, 515–20).

31 Ximénez de Sandoval says the Republicans silenced the news of Primo de Rivera's death, remarking that all sorts of contradictory notices did, however, reach the Nationalist zone (José Antonio, 517–18). The Republican newspaper El Día (Alicante) reported his death sentence (reprinted in VV.AA., Dolor y memoria de España en el segundo aniversario de la muerte de José Antonio [Barcelona: Ediciones Jerarquía, 1939], 293–94), and very brief statements of the execution, though apparently no detailed account, subsequently appeared in the Republican press: Anon., ‘¡¡José Antonio, condenado a muerte!!’, Dolor y memoria de España, 293–94, and Anon., ‘Comentario a la noticia dada en la prensa roja sobre el fusilamiento de José Antonio’, Dolor y memoria de España, 319–20.

32 Stanley G. Payne, España. Una historia única, trans. Jesús Cuéllar (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2008), 323.

33 Villena, ‘De una historia que vio la Alhambra’, in José Antonio y los poetas, prol. López Pascual, 68.

34 Molina Fajardo, Los últimos días de García Lorca, 397.

35 José Antonio Primo de Rivera, ‘Discurso sobre la revolución española’ (19 May 1935), in Obras completas <http://www.laeditorialvirtual.com.ar/pages/joseantonio/joseantonio.htm#Art3> (accessed 14 June 2011). The Falangist clerical Fermín Yzurdiaga Lorca writes similarly of adopting ‘ante la vida y los peligros de la vida, la postura vertical, rígida, vigilante’ (Discurso al silencio y voz de la Falange [Pamplona: Jerarquía, 1937], p. 12 <http://www.scribd.com/doc/83504494/DISCURSO-AL-SILENCIO-Y-VOZ-DE-LA-FALANGE-POR-FERMIN-YZURDIAGA-LORCA> (accessed 14 June 2011).

36 Ximénez de Sandoval, Camisa azul, 390; see also Albert, Vanguardistas de camisa azul, 418–19.

37 Jorge Jordana Fuentes, ‘Epílogo’ to David Jato Miranda, La rebelión de los estudiantes (Madrid: Talleres Gráficos, 1953), in Alcocer, Radiografía de un fraude, 239–42 (p. 241).

38 Sultana Wahnón, ‘La recepción de García Lorca en la España de la posguerra’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 43:2 (1995), 409–31 (pp. 411–13, 417–18).

39 Sandie Holguín, Creating Spaniards: Culture and National Identity in Republican Spain (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 105–07.

40 Ernesto Giménez Caballero, ‘Decadencia de la poesía española’, La Gaceta Literaria, 121, 15 January 1932, p. 15; also Agustín de Foxá, ‘Los Homeros rojos’, ABC, 28 May 1939, pp. 3–4 (p. 4).

41 José María Pemán, Poema de la Bestia y el Ángel. Poesía. Obras completas, ed. Jorge Villén, 7 vols (Madrid: Escelicer, 1947), I, 917.

42 José María Castroviejo Blanco Cicerón, Altura. Poemas de guerra, prol. Juan Aparicio, 2^nd ed. (Barcelona: Ediciones Jerarquía, 1939), 9–12 (p. 9); I use the 2^nd edition to cite Castroviejo's poems.

43 See Aparicio, ‘Prólogo’, to Castroviejo Blanco Cicerón, Altura. Poemas de guerra, I, 10–11; José María García de Tuñón Aza, ‘José María Castroviejo, un poeta de Altura’, Altar Mayor (Hermandad del Valle de los Caídos), 121 (April–May 2008), 865–75; also Manuel Antonio Estévez, who sees Castroviejo as a leading traditionalist: ‘Mar del Sol, primer libro de Castroviejo: su celtismo y su deuda con Manoel Antonio’, Madrygal, 9 (2006), 43–51 (p. 46).

44 José María Castroviejo Blanco Cicerón, Altura. Poemas de guerra (Vigo: Editorial Cartel, 1938), 39. Franco himself used rhetoric like ‘con paso firme y seguro’ or ‘con paso firme’ (see ‘El mensaje de Franco a todos los españoles en el día de ayer’, ABC [Sevilla], 2 October 1937, p. 5, and ‘Discurso de Unificación’, 19 April 1937 <Generalisimofranco.com> (accessed 22 May 2009). The phrase ‘es preciso’ also appears in fellow Falangist (and Galician) Álvaro Cunqueiro, ‘El César escucha cómo cantas’; see Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, Literatura fascista española, 2 vols (Madrid: Akal, 1986), II, 141–43. ‘Paso firme’ is among the very few non-Republican homages to Lorca (Ridruejo, Entrambasaguas) included in Eduardo Castro's excellent anthology and speaks to the paucity of such texts: Versos para Federico (Granada: Editorial Comares, 1998).

45 Castroviejo, ‘Paso firme’, 40; Castroviejo, ‘El último hermano’, 37.

46 Anon, ‘Recuerdo y homenaje a los compañeros caídos’, Revista de Obras Públicas. número especial 1936–1939 dedicado a la guerra (1940), 4–14 (p. 8), and García de Tuñón Aza, ‘José María Castroviejo’ (Castroviejo married María Francisca Bolíbar Sequeiros).

47 García Serrano, Diccionario para un macuto, 470–73.

48 Federico García Lorca, Obras completas, ed. Miguel García-Posada, 4 vols (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores, 1996–97); see ‘Diálogos de un caricaturista salvaje’, III, 637. An incomplete version of ‘El último hermano’ is reprinted in Todo en el aire. Versos sin enemigo: antología insólita de la poesía durante la guerra incivil española, ed. Gonzalo Santonja (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores, 1997), and in Castro: the last twenty-four lines are missing in both anthologies, with the final three stanzas of ‘Paso firme’ attached to the poem, in Santonja. My sincere thanks to Eduardo Castro and Manuel Antonio Estévez for their invaluable help in clarifying the publishing history of this poem.

49 See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), 211–35 (p. 235). See also: Francisco Caudet, ‘Aproximación a la poesía fascista española: 1936–1939’, Bulletin Hispanique, 88 (1986), 155–89 (p. 160); Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, ‘Fascismo y poesía en España’, in Actas del Séptimo Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, celebrado en Venecia del 25 al 30 de agosto de 1980, ed. Giuseppe Bellini, 2 vols (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1982), II, 883–91; Albert, Vanguardistas de camisa azul, 358–60.

50 Joaquín Romero Murube, Siete romances, ed. A. Martínez and Manuel García (Huelva: Editorial Point de Lunettes, 2004), 47.

51 García (quoted in Anon., ‘Joaquín Romero Murube, el falangista que escondió a Miguel Hernández’, Memoria Azul, 19 September 2006, <http://memoriazul.lacoctelera.net/post/2006/09/19/joaquin-romero-murube-falangista-escondio-miguel> (accessed 25 February 2011). For more details on the Romero Murube-Lorca relationship, see Manuel García and A. Martínez, ‘Prólogo’, Romero Murube, Siete romances, ed. Martínez and García, 9–29. Andrés Trapiello suggests Romero Murube may have gone to investigate the poet's death at Franco's request (Las armas y las letras: literatura y Guerra Civil [1936–1939], 3^rd ed. [Barcelona: Destino, 2010], 582). We know that the Generalissimo sent agents to Granada for that purpose, but they found out nothing evidently and in any event appeared uninterested (Agustín Penón, Miedo, olvido y fantasía. Crónica de la investigación de Agustín Penón sobre Federico García Lorca Granada-Madrid [1955–56], ed. Marta Osorio, 2^nd ed. [Granada: Comares, 2009], 545–46). Penón also notes that a military man, Emilio Moreno Olmedo, carried out a secret inquiry in October 1936; he too knew Lorca (Miedo, olvido y fantasía, 543–45); see also Gabriel Pozo Felguera, Lorca, el último paseo. Claves para entender el asesinato del poeta (Granada: Ultramarina, 2009), 193. And Ernesto Giménez Caballero says he went some time during the war, accompanied by his wife, and by Colonel Víctor Martínez Simancas and Luis Rosales, to investigate the poet's death in Granada (‘Lorca’, in Retratos españoles [Bastante parecidos], prol. Pere Gimferrer [Barcelona: Planeta, 1985], 165–68 [p. 166]).

52 ‘Romance del crimen’ is reprinted in El crimen fue en Granada. Elegías a la muerte de García Lorca, ed. Isabel Clúa (Barcelona: Lumen, 2006). It first appeared with the title ‘Las aleluyas del crimen’, in Mediodía. Revista de Sevilla, 14 February 1929 (see Martínez and García, ‘Prólogo’, in Romero Murube, Siete romances, ed. Martínez and García, 9–29 [pp. 12–13]). See also Romero Murube, ‘Romance’, in Romero Murube, Siete romances, ed. Martínez and García, 47–48.

53 Romero Murube, ‘Romance’, in Romero Murube, Siete romances, ed. García and Martínez and García, 47–48; García Lorca, ‘Reyerta’, in Obras completas, ed. García-Posada, I, 419.

54 Albert, Vanguardistas de camisa azul, 414.

55 Ximénez de Sandoval, Camisa azul, 42.

56 Joaquín Romero Murube, ‘No te olvides’, reprinted in Siete romances, ed. Martínez and García, 27–28 (p. 27).

57 See Romero Murube, Siete romances, ed. Martínez and García, 28, n. 21; and also Caudet, ‘Aproximación a la poesía fascista española’, 165, for the Nationalist use of ‘España’.

58 See Santonja's fine anthology Todo en el aire for more examples of non-sectarian Civil War poetry.

59 I have relied on Ríos Carratalá's excellent study of Neville, Una arrolladora simpatía, for these details. See also María Luisa Burguera Nadal, Edgar Neville entre el humor y la nostalgia (Valencia: Institució Alfons Magnànim/Diputació de València/Univ. Jaume I, 1999); Manuel Espín, ‘La biografía inventada de Edgar Neville’, El Siglo, 751, 23 July 2007, <http://www.elsiglodeuropa.es/siglo/historico/2007/751/751pens.html> (accessed 27 May 2012).

60 Ríos Carratalá, Una arrolladora simpatía, 61, 72, 94, 124; on the diplomatic corps, see also Francisco Ayala, Recuerdos y olvidos (1906–2006) (Madrid: Alianza, 2006), 223.

61 Edgar Neville, ‘La obra de Federico, bien nacional’, ABC, 6 November 1966, p. 4; reprinted in his Las terceras de ABC, ed. Rafael Flórez (Madrid: Editorial Prensa Española, 1976).

62 See also Ríos Carratalá, Una arrolladora simpatía, 31–35; and Melissa Dinverno, ‘Raising the Dead: García Lorca, Trauma and the Cultural Mediation of Mourning’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 9 (2005), 29–52 (pp. 32–33).

63 Neville, ‘La obra de Federico, bien nacional’, 4; Anon., ‘Trapiello: “Edgar Neville sentó las bases de la Ley de Memoria Histórica” ’, Terra Noticias, 6 May 2010, http://noticias.terra.es/2010/genteycultura/0506/actualidad/trapiello-edgar-neville-sento-las-bases-de-la-ley-de-memoria-historica-00.aspx (accessed 6 May 2010); and Ríos Carratalá, Una arrolladora simpatía, 33–34. Neville says it was Antonio Machado's wish that Lorca be reburied in the Alhambra, which appears to reflect the final lines of ‘El crimen fue en Granada’ (not quoted in the article).

64 See Ríos Carratalá, Una arrolladora simpatía, 34, for criticism by Neville's friends, including Rafael García Serrano, of his dream of reconciliation; Andrés Trapiello, ‘Causa general II’, El País, 25 April 2010, <http://elpais.com/diario/2010/04/25/opinion/1272146411_850215.html> (accessed 25 April 2010). Neville's letter, which he titled ‘Otra vez Lorca’ and addressed to the journalist Miguel Pérez Ferrero, is printed in its entirety in Trapiello, Las armas y las letras, 569.

65 Neville, ‘La obra de Federico, bien nacional’, 4; Edgar Neville, ‘García Lorca’, in Edgar Neville, Obras selectas, ed. Miguel Ruiz-Castillo (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1969), 815–17 (p. 815). Ruiz-Castillo, ‘Preámbulo del editor’, xiii–xv (p. xiii), observes that Neville was personally involved in the preparation of his Obras selectas. The changes Neville made in ‘García Lorca’ could only have come from him. For example, he modifies the date of his last encounter with Lorca from the 15^th to either the 15^th or 16^th July 1936 (Lorca, however, left Madrid on the 13^th; see Ian Gibson, Federico García Lorca: A Life [New York: Pantheon, 1989], 444). He adds another line to what the goatherd told him, when asked where Lorca might be buried. He talks as well about being unable to respond to an article by García Serrano. Giménez Caballero, by then Spain's Ambassador to Paraguay, who was still promoting the misbegotten image of Lorca as a Falangist martyr in 1966, alludes approvingly to Neville's ABC article; see Ernesto Giménez Caballero, ‘Conmemoración de García Lorca en el Paraguay’, in Federico García Lorca/Guillermo de Torre. Correspondencia y amistad, ed. Carlos García (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2009), 472–79 (p. 473) (originally published in La Tribuna [Asunción], [4 December 1966], pp. 7, 11]). (He appears to have forgotten his earlier, acidic comments on the decadence of vanguard writers.)

66 Neville, ‘García Lorca’, in Obras selectas, ed. Ruiz-Castillo, 816.

67 Edgar Neville, Su último paisaje, Cuadernos de María José 3 (Málaga: Publicaciones de la Librería Anticuaria el Guadalhorce, 1966); Edgar Neville, ‘Su último paisaje’, in Poemas (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1967), 37–40.

68 Antonio Machado, ‘El crimen fue en Granada’, in Antología comentada, selection, intro. and notes by Francisco Caudet, 2 vols (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1999), I, 331–33 (p. 331).

69 Neville, ‘Su último paisaje’, in Poemas, 37–40 (p. 37).

70 Neville, ‘Su último paisaje’, in Poemas, 38–39.

71 Neville, ‘Su último paisaje’, in Poemas, 40; see Ríos Carratalá, Una arrolladora simpatía, 35 for Lorca correspondence; Isabel García Lorca, Recuerdos míos, 273, 294; for letters from Neville to Lorca see Catálogo de la correspondencia a Federico García Lorca, ed. Christian de Paepe, VI, 361–62.

72 ‘Nota a la edición’, in Neville, Su último paisaje, n.p.

73 Neville, ‘Su último paisaje’, in Poemas, 40.

74 De Foxá, ‘Los Homeros rojos’, 4; Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, ‘El olor marxista’, ABC, 28 May 1939, p. 3. Both articles are reprinted in Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, Literatura fascista española, 2 vols (Madrid: Akal, 1986), II, 972–76.

75 Peter Alexander, Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1982), 120–21. For my discussion of Campbell's life and personality I have relied on the excellent accounts of Alexander, of Joseph Pearce, Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2004), and of David Wright, Roy Campbell (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1961); see also the fascinating though not always factually reliable: Roy Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse: An Autobiography, foreword by Laurie Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).

76 Wright said: ‘Among colonials he was a European and among Europeans a colonial’ (Roy Campbell, 38). See also Bernard Bergonzi, ‘Roy Campbell: Outsider on the Right’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2:2 (1967), 133–47; and Anthony Akerman, ‘Dark Outsider: Writing the Dramatic Life of Roy Campbell’, English in Africa, 30:1 (2003), 5–20.

77 Roy Campbell, The Georgiad (London: Boriswood Limited, 1931).

78 Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse, 194.

79 Alexander, Roy Campbell: ‘Belief in God, in Spain at this time, was itself a political act’ (152); see also M. E. Williams, ‘Roy Campbell, Lorca, and the Civil War’, in Leeds Papers on Lorca and on Civil War Verse, ed. Margaret A. Rees (Leeds: Trinity & All Saints' College, 1988), 93–107 (p. 100). On Flowering Rifle, Stephen Spender wrote, ‘There are several passages in this book which make me feel physically sick’ (‘The Talking Bronco’, in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. Valentine Cunningham [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980], 440–43 [p. 442]).

80 Roy Campbell, Flowering Rifle: A Poem from the Battlefield of Spain (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939), 93.

81 Campbell, Flowering Rifle, 93.

82 Alexander, Roy Campbell, 144.

83 Roy Campbell, Flowering Rifle, Collected Poems, 3 vols (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., rev. ed. 1957) I, 671–72.

84 On the theme of cowardice in Falangist ideology see Ximénez de Sandoval, Camisa azul, 204–05, and Albert, Vanguardistas de camisa azul, 430–31.

85 Alexander, Roy Campbell, 226–27.

86 Letter from Arturo Barea to Guillermo de Torre (24 June 1946), in Daniel Eisenberg, ‘Nuevos documentos relativos a la edición de Poeta en Nueva York y otras obras de García Lorca’, Anales de Literatura Española, 5 (1986–87), 67–107 (p. 87). A selection of Lorca poems eventually appeared in Roy Campbell, Collected Works, ed. Peter Alexander, Michael Chapman and Marcia Leveson, 4 vols (Craighall: A. D. Donker, 1985–88), II, Poetry Translations. The manuscript notebooks are housed in the National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, South Africa (CW 2, 482). I am most grateful to Joseph Pearce for responding to my inquiries about the Campbell translations.

87 Letter from Francisco García Lorca to Guillermo de Torre (17 July 1946), in Eisenberg, ‘Nuevos documentos’, 90. See also Isabel García Lorca's unflattering portrait of Martínez Nadal (Recuerdos míos, ed. Gurruchaga, 166–67).

88 Letter from Ilsa Barea to Guillermo de Torre (20 August 1946), in Eisenberg, ‘Nuevos documentos’, 91, Alexander, Roy Campbell, 172–73; and Pearce, Unafraid of Virginia Woolf, 269–72 on his wartime experience; see also Charles David Ley, who says Campbell, while visiting in postwar Spain, was careful not to boast of fighting alongside the Nationalists: La Costanilla de los diablos (memorias literarias 1943–1952) (Madrid: José Esteban, Editor, 1981), 111. One Nationalist supporter claimed, incorrectly, that Campbell ‘fought in Franco's forces from the day of the Relief. This enables the reader to realise that Roy Campbell's poem is something real and experienced’ (J. Arteaga de León, ‘Roy Campbell through Spanish Eyes’, Spain [London], 85, 18 May 1939, p. 140).

89 Ley, La Costanilla de los diablos, 124.

90 In 1946 Campbell published this ditty on Lorca: ‘Not only did he lose his life / By shots assassinated: / But with a hatchet and a knife / Was after that—translated!’ (Talking Bronco, 1956], 70). As a translator, he was keenly aware of the lethal effects of bad translation, though here he is also satirizing the stereotypical martyr image attached to Lorca. (Campbell's English versions of St John of the Cross won the Foyle Prize for Poetry in 1951.)

91 Roy Campbell, Lorca: An Appreciation of His Poetry (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1952), 1. In a brief piece from 1949 he says that Lorca's reputation ‘has been spread like wild-fire throughout the world by means of communist propaganda’ (‘Federico Garcia Lorca’, in Collected Works, ed. Alexander, Chapman and Leveson, IV, 318–19 [p. 319]).

92 Nationalist supporter Arteaga de León remarked that Flowering Rifle ‘serves also to condemn the Red shadow of Communism and its allies’ (‘Roy Campbell through Spanish Eyes’, 140). See also Esteban Pujals, España y la guerra de 1936 en la poesía de Roy Campbell (Madrid: Ateneo, 1959), 68; Stephen Spender, in André Gide, et al., The God that Failed, 1949, ed. Richard Crossman (New York: Bantam Books, 1959 [1^st ed. 1949]), 226–27; Stephen Spender, World within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender (New York: St Martin's Press, 1994), 251. Campbell refers to The God that Failed on at least two more occasions; see ‘A Decade in Retrospect’, and ‘Poetry and Experience’, in Collected Works, ed. Alexander, Chapman and Leveson, IV, 312, 430.

93 John Wheelwright, ‘The Poetry of Lorca’, Poetry, 5:3 (December 1937), 167–70 (pp. 167, 169).

94 Hugh MacDiarmid, The Battle Continues (Edinburgh: Castle Wynd Printers, 1957), 14, 16. For more on MacDiarmid-Campbell see Derek Gagen, ‘Lorca and “English” Poetry’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 5:2 (1999), 161–72 (pp. 165–67); also Pearce, Unafraid of Virginia Woolf, 388–89. MacDiarmid's poem appeared shortly after Campbell's death.

 95 Campbell, Lorca: An Appreciation of His Poetry, 1–3.

 96 Stephen Spender, ‘Speaking for Spain’, New Republic, 128, 2 February 1953, pp. 18–19 (p. 19).

 97 Geoffrey Brereton, ‘Two Spanish Writers’, The New Statesman and Nation, 44, 18 October 1952, p. 456.

 98 Campbell, Lorca: An Appreciation of His Poetry, 2.

 99 Manuel Iribarren, ‘Letras’, in Rodríguez Puértolas, Literatura fascista española, II, 402–05 (p. 405) (originally published in Jerarquía, 1 [1936]). My thanks to Derek Gagen and Kevin Foster, who also searched for the source of Campbell's quotations.

100 Richard Burgin, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Avon Books, 1970), 109.

101 Dudley Fitts, ‘The Voice of Lorca’, New York Times, 21 December 1952, <http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/12/specials/lorca-voice.html> (accessed 26 November 2009).

102 Campbell, ‘Federico Garcia Lorca’, in Collected Works, ed. Alexander, Chapman and Leveson, IV, 318–19. In 1948 José María Pemán called the poet's death an ‘episodio vil y desgraciado’ (‘García Lorca’, ABC, 5 December 1948, p. 3). Franco's brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer insisted in the same year that out-of-control elements, unaffiliated with Falange, killed Lorca (Ian Gibson, El hombre que detuvo a García Lorca: Ramón Ruiz Alonso y la muerte del poeta [Madrid: Aguilar, 2007], 160).

103 Campbell, Lorca: An Appreciation of His Poetry, 47. Dudley Fitts wrote, ‘it would seem almost that Roy Campbell was born to write this explosive little book’ (‘The Voice of Lorca’).

104 Campbell, Flowering Rifle, 93.

105 Campbell, Lorca: An Appreciation of His Poetry, 50.

106 Fitts remarked that Campbell finds in Lorca, or ‘imagines that he finds’, those qualities that are his own (‘The Voice of Lorca’).