Luis Cernuda Bidón (September 21, 1902 – November 5, 1963) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. During the Spanish Civil War, in early 1938, he went to the UK to deliver some lectures and this became the start of an exile that lasted till the end of his life. He taught in the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge before moving in 1947 to the US. In the 1950s he moved to Mexico. While he continued to write poetry, he also published wide-ranging books of critical essays, covering French, English and German as well as Spanish literature. He was frank about his homosexuality at a time when this was problematic and became something of a role model for this in Spain. His collected poems were published under the title La realidad y el deseo.
Biography
Seville and early life Cernuda was born in the Barrio Santa Cruz, Calle Conde de Tójar 6 (now Acetres),Villena intro to edition of Las Nubes p 11 in Seville in 1902, the son of a colonel in the Regiment of Engineers.Poesía completa: Cronología biográfica He had two older sisters. The recollections and impressions of childhood contained in his poems, and the prose poems collected in Ocnos, suggest that he was always a solitary, introverted, and timid child whose unhappiness in the family led to his living vicariously through books and through his strong visual impressions of his native city.Connell p 201 His first encounter with poetry came at the age of 9 when he glanced through a copy of Bécquer's Rimas that had been lent to his sisters by their cousins Luisa and Brígida de la Sota.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 625 Despite the fact that he later testified that this left no more than a dormant impression upon him, he began to write poetry himself during his studies at the Escolapios School in Seville from 1915 to 1919 around the age of 14.hispanicexile.bham.ac.uk/people/51 In 1914, the family moved into the Engineers' Barracks in the Prado, on the outskirts of Seville. In 1918, they moved to Calle del Aire, where he would later write the poems of Perfil del aire.
In 1919 he began to study Law at the University of Seville, where, during his first year, he attended classes in Spanish Language and Literature given by Pedro Salinas. His extreme shyness prevented him from mentioning his literary activities until Salinas' notice was caught by a prose poem published in a student magazine. He gave Cernuda encouragement and urged him to read both classical Spanish poetry and modern French literature.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 627 It was at Salinas' suggestion that Cernuda sent his first collection of poetry, Perfil del aire, to Manuel Altolaguirre and Emilio Prados, who had begun, late in 1926, to publish a magazine called Litoral. As was the practice in those days, many such magazines published collections of poetry as supplements.
His father died in 1920 and he continued to live at home with his mother and sisters. In 1923 he did military service in the Regiment of Cavalry. In 1924, as he was reaching the end of his undergraduate course, he participated in a series of meetings with a small group of fellow students in Salinas's house. These stimulated his poetic vocation and helped to guide his readings of French literature.
He became a Bachelor of Law in September 1925 but was undecided about what to do next. He thought about joining the diplomatic service but decided not to on discovering that it would entail a move to Madrid. In October, Salinas arranged for him to make the acquaintance of Juan Ramón Jiménez in the gardens of the Alcázar of Seville.
In January 1926, he made his first trip to Madrid, where Salinas was instrumental in arranging introductions to, among others, Ortega y Gasset - who had published some of his poems in his Revista de Occidente in December 1925 - Juan Chabás, Melchor Fernández Almagro, and Enrique Díez-Canedo; At the time his first book was being unfavourably received around April 1927, he was again in Madrid. Although he later described himself at that time as inexperto, aislado en Sevilla, he was in reality already known to a number of the influential Spanish literati of the period. His indecision about a choice of career continued through 1926-27. In December 1927, the Góngora tercentenary celebrations reached a climax with a series of poetry readings and lectures at the Arts Club of Seville by people such as García Lorca, Dámaso Alonso, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, José Bergamín and others. Although he took no direct part in the proceedings, he did get the chance to read some of his poems and he made the acquaintance of Lorca.Gibson p 200
Madrid and France
His mother died in July 1928 and, at the start of September, Cernuda left Seville.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 632 He spent a few days in Málaga with Altolaguirre, Prados and José María Hinojosa before moving to Madrid. Although he had a law degree, he had no intention of making practical use of it. He was starting to realise that poetry was the only thing that really mattered to him.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 633 He renewed acquaintance with Pedro Salinas and met Vicente Aleixandre. Salinas arranged for him to become the Spanish lector at the University of Toulouse. He took up post in November and stayed there for an academic year. The experience of living on his own in a foreign city led him to a crucial realisation about himself: his almost crippling shyness, his unhappiness in a family setting, his sense of isolation from the rest of humanity, had all been symptoms of a latent homosexuality which now manifested itself and which he accepted, in a spirit of defiance. This led to a decisive change in the type of poetry he wrote. He also discovered a love of jazz and films, which seems to have activated an interest in the USA.Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 636
Between his return from Toulouse in June 1929 to 1936, Cernuda lived in Madrid and participated actively in the literary and cultural scene of the Spanish capital. At the start of 1930, he found a job in a bookshop owned by León Sánchez Cuesta. All through this period, he worked with many organisations attempting to create a more liberal and tolerant Spain. For example, between 1932 and 1935, he participated in the Misiones Pedagógicas - a cultural outreach organisation set up by the Spanish Republic. He also contributed articles to radical journals such as Octubre, edited by Alberti and his wife María Teresa León, which demonstrates his political commitment at that time, although there is no evidence that he formally joined the Communist Party.Gibbons intro p 10 In June 1935, he took lodgings in Calle Viriato, Madrid, above the flat of Altolaguirre and his wife Concha Méndez.
In February 1936, he participated with Lorca and Alberti in an homage to the Galician writer Valle-Inclán. Since Perfil del aire, he had only managed to publish one collection - Donde habite el olvido - in 1934, and a few individual poems. This difficulty in getting published gave Cernuda the chance to revise and reflect on his work. It also occurred to him in the meantime that he could bring all his poetry together under the title La realidad y el deseo.Cernuda OCP vol 1 Historial de un libro p 641 In April 1936, José Bergamín published the book in his journal Cruz y Raya. Subsequent editions added new poems as separate books under this collective title. On April 21, there was a celebratory dinner, attended by Lorca, Salinas, Pablo Neruda, Altolaguirre, Alberti, Aleixandre and Bergamín himself.Gibson p 432
Spanish Civil War
When the Spanish Civil War broke out, a friend of his, Concha de Albornoz, arranged for him to join her in Paris as secretary to her father, the ambassador Alvaro de Albornoz. He remained there from July to September 1936, but after that he returned to Madrid along with the ambassador and his family. Alvaro de Albornoz was a founding figure of the Spanish Second Republic and his daughter was a prominent figure in the artistic world of Madrid.
For perhaps the only time in his life Cernuda felt the desire to be useful to society, which he tried to do by serving on the Republican side.Cernuda: OCP Historial de un libro vol 1 p 642 He was hopeful that there was a possibility of righting some of the social injustices that he saw in Spanish society. From October 1936 to April 1937, he participated in radio broadcasts with A. Serrano Plaja in the Sierra de Guadarrama, north of Madrid. In April 1937, he moved to Valencia and began to write poems that would be collected in Las Nubes. He also came into contact with Juan Gil-Albert and the other members of the editorial team behind the periodical Hora de España and began to work with them. In June, the representative of the Ministry of Education made objections to a poem to be published in that journal on the subject of Lorca's murder and he had to remove a stanza that made explicit mention of the subject's homosexuality, which was neither common knowledge at that time nor was it acceptable to the Communist Party, who exerted pressure to censor it.Taravillo: Cernuda Años españoles p 383 This poem, "A un poeta muerto (F.G.L.)" was later published in Las Nubes with the censored stanza restored. In later life, Cernuda reflected that this attempt to be socially committed had been futile: "the flow of events made me see, little by little, how instead of that chance of life for a young Spain, there was only the criminal game being played by a party that many people joined for personal gain."Cernuda: OCP notes to Historial de un libro vol 1 p 857 He was motivated by his innate rebelliousness and disgust at Spanish society rather than by real political commitment.
He played the role of Don Pedro in a performance of Lorca's play Mariana Pineda during the Second Congress of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in Valencia in 1937. At this time, he met Octavio Paz. In October, he returned to Madrid, where he remained until February 1938, working on the periodical El Mono Azul, edited by Alberti and María Teresa León.
Exile in Britain
In 1935 at a salon hosted by Carlos Morla Lynch, a diplomat, diarist, amateur musician and closet homosexual working in the Chilean Embassy in Madrid, Cernuda met an English poet called Stanley Richardson, nine years younger than him, who was making a brief visit to the country. Richardson had already met Altolaguirre and Concha Méndez in London. They enjoyed some kind of intense but short-lived relationship, commemorated in a poem dated 20–22 March 1935 and included in Invocaciones, before Richardson returned home.Taravillo Años españoles p 315 In February 1938,Stanley Richardson and Spain Richardson arranged for him to give a series of lectures in Oxford and Cambridge. At the time, Cernuda thought that he would be away from Spain for one or two months, however this was to be the start of an exile that would last for the rest of his life. The lectures never took place. Richardson was well-connected, however, and arranged a party for him, attended by celebrities such as the Duchess of Atholl, Gavin Henderson, 2nd Baron Faringdon, the Chinese ambassador, Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay. Even by then, the situation in Spain meant that it was not advisable for Cernuda to return and so Richardson suggested that he should join a colony of evacuated Basque children at Eaton Hastings on Faringdon's estate.Murphy: Pub Poets