How Lorca Died

...The purpose of his visit was to find the grave of Granada's-and Spain's -Greatest 20th-century poet and dramatist, Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered in mysterious circumstances during the early days of the Spanish Civil War...

...You come here to find out about Federico's death, yet you don't know a damn thing about what really happened in Granada in 1936...

...Everyone he interviewed in Lorca's native city spoke in riddles, not only about the identity of Lorca's killers, but about why he should have been so capriciously slaughtered at the height of his fame, at 38...

...Granada had been the last stronghold of the Moors, who were expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella...

...aT THE T1ME of his death, Lorca's fame was widespread throughout the Western world, and the epilogue to Gibson's study is a sickening story of the Franco government's shameless attempt to cover up the facts of the poet's demise...

...at the center of the puzzle is the city of Granada itself, a hotbed of artistic innovation and energy in the early decades of the century, when Lorca was growing up and achieving his earliest poetic fame...

...Today his death is called "a small-town crime," attributed to "the disorder of the early moments of the Civil War...

...The answers Gibson offers to the 30-year-old mystery are by no means simple...

...Nor could Lorca's homosexuality be even reluctantly condoned in a Church-ridden country like Spain, whose obsessive machismo gave no quarter to any form of sexual deviation...

...No sooner had he arrived in Granada than he realized how seriously he had endangered himself, and he took refuge in the house of Luis Rosales, a Falangist poet...

...Gibson makes it clear that the tragedy must be understood in the context of the savage repression that devastated Granada when it fell to the Nationalists...

...I wish he had incorporated his hard-won facts into a full-scale critical biography in which both the life and the literature of the Granada poet received their due, along with his death...

...as it is, The Death of Lorca is not much more than a monograph, padded out with appendices that do not seem crucially relevant...

...Their victory was followed by a shameful orgy of slaughter, carried out not only by the police and officials of the Falange, but by the notorious Black Squads, "a loose collection of individuals who enjoyed killing for the sake of killing and to whom Valdes [Chief of the Militia], in order to reduce the population of Granada to the greatest possible state of panic, had given carte blanche to carry out assassinations...

...Unlike earlier investigators, Gibson cast the widest possible net in his research...

...Gerald Brenan has written of this faction that "it represented the reaction of the Church and especially of the Jesuits to the Republic...

...The mortality rate in a reader's memory for such transient bits of journalism is of course very high, yet even if Brenan's beautiful piece had not later been reprinted in his marvelous The Face of Spain, I don't think I would ever have forgotten it...

...We left him in a ditch and I fired two bullets into his arse for being a queer...

...anyone suspected of Left-wing sentiments, as well as the finest of Granada's intellectuals, died in the notorious cemetery where the executions were, all too conveniently, performed...

...Kept in prison for two and a half days, he was taken out to the cemetery at dawn on august 20 and killed...

...Gradually the ban on Lorca was lifted, and his "reinstatement," as Gibson writes, became virtually official in 1966 "when aBC, the most widely read newspaper in Spain, published a 'homage' to the poet on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of his death...

...By Gibson's admittedly conservative estimate, over 4,500 citizens of Granada were wiped out in an appallingly short time...

...Initially, officials claimed he had been shot by Republican extremists because he was insufficiently anti-Fascist...

...He read every article, book, newspaper, and document that had any connection with Lorca and the repression of Granada by the Nationalists...

...Lorca was one of those rare writers whose talents and temperament capture a time and embody a culture...

...He was living in Madrid when Granada was taken, but his love of his native place was so great that he could not stay away during its crisis...

...Ironically, Lorca deliberately put his head into the noose...

...Meanwhile, in the first decade after Lorca died, it was dangerous to discuss him openly in Spain...

...a few days after Lorca went into hiding, his whereabouts were discovered by the party, and he was arrested by a deputy of the accion Popular...

...The most serious threat to the poet came from the accion Popular, an ultra-conservative, fanatically Catholic party...

...However, Brenan was unable to find the grave he sought, and he was frustrated at every point of his inquiry...

...although Lorca was by no means the untutored genius some critics have taken him to be-he was very much an educated middle-class intellectual-both his poems and his plays were steeped in the folklore and legends of andalusia, in its language and music...

...Thus, Lorca was close to a number of Falangists...

...although Lorca was outspokenly pro-Republican, he was a political naif who believed, as his friend Gabriel Celaya remarked, "that people are always good . . . that a friend is a friend, Fascist or no...

...What he uncovered is a chain of complicity that begins in the complex personality of Lorca himself and extends through many terrible episodes in the Spanish Civil War and the repressive aftermath that persists to this day...

...none of his books were sold, none of his plays produced...

...In the more than two decades since Brenan's essay appeared, there have been torrents of conflicting, and sometimes bizarre, speculation concerning Lorca's murder, yet it was not until recently that someone began to dig indefatigably into all the available sources and hit the pay dirt of truth...

...a surviving executioner remarked to Gibson: "We were sick and tired of queers in Granada...

...When this didn't wash, Franco's propagandists tried to put the blame on "unspecified assassins acting on their own initiative...

...Unfortunately, Gibson's meticulous account of Lorca's death does not quite constitute a book...

...In a repressive country, there is no lack of ways to rewrite history for the convenience of the moment...

...We are all in Gibson's debt for finally getting to the bottom of a shrouded old disgrace, but he must now return to the book he originally went to Granada to write...

...The motives surrounding his murder were both cultural and political...

...So painstakingly thorough has been Gibson's research that he even located the gravedigger who buried Lorca, and consequently learned the answer Brenan had pursued in vain two decades before...

...Writers & Writings HOW LORCa DIED by pearl k. bell In 1950 the British writer Gerald Brenan, who has spent most of his adult life in andalusia and knows Spain as few foreigners can hope to, published a poignant account in The New Yorker about a visit to Granada...

...Discovering, as Brenan had, that "people were still afraid to talk openly with strangers about the war, and that the police were keeping a close eye on what was going on," he nevertheless came up with a story that is fascinating, dark and strange...

...as Gibson points out, these sentiments did not endear the poet to the Nationalist reactionaries who took over Granada with effortless ease in July 1936...

...in fact he was coming over to us when stupidity and rancour went out to meet him on the way...

...Lorca passionately believed that the triumph of Castile was a lethal blow against the soul of Granada: "It was a disastrous event," he wrote...

...Several years ago the Irish scholar Ian Gibson went to Granada to write a doctoral thesis on Lorca's work, only to find himself quickly deflected into another task, which has resulted in The Death of Lorca (O'Hara, 217 pp., $10.00...

...By the early 1950s a different tack was tried: Franco's brother-in-law, Serrano Sufier, set off a rumor campaign trying to incriminate the Catholics and absolve the Falange entirely...

...His dramas Blood Wedding and Yerma restated in Spanish terms, in the passionate setting of rural tragedy, the ancient theme of death as the expiation of personal and social guilt...

...Still, like all great poets whose power is mythic as well as verbal, he was able to fuse the immediacy and tradition of his native Granada with the wider cosmopolitan culture of Europe...

...For in Granada people kept exclaiming: "You foreigners, you're all the same...

...an admirable civilization, and a poetry, architecture and delicacy unique in the world?all were lost, to give way to an impoverished, cowed town, a wasteland populated by the worst bourgeoisie in Spain today...

...this gave him a reputation far beyond Spain, and added sharply to the shock that greeted the news of his death, when it was finally revealed...

...He even had the effrontery to declare that "Federico Garcia Lorca was not in the enemy camp...

...He wrote brilliant lyric poetry about andalusian life, about the Spanish obsession with death, the land, the blood of Christ...

...He was also tireless in his efforts to locate and interview anyone who could offer him a firsthand account of the poet's last days...