”Poetry Remains Indestructible.” On the Resilience of Art in the Face of Fascism

Perhaps poetry is best minted under pressure. Poetry that lasts. George Herbert at Bemerton with consumption. Anna Akhmatova under Stalin. John Keats’ blood on his pillow. Philip Larkin washing dishes in Hull after a day’s work at the library. Sylvia Plath in London with two babies and a broken marriage and the coldest winter in a hundred years. Marie Howe, her brother dying of AIDS. Christian Wiman with blood cancer.

Different kinds of pressure—most dramatic, but some ordinary—yield a desire to get a message across, to have someone listen, to know what life was like, that life has meaning, that a life mattered, no matter how inconsequential it might appear to others. Pressure yields fiat; fiat yields clarity; clarity yields memorable poems and memorable poems yield reasons to live. Yes. They do. No time to obfuscate.

Jaime Gil de Biedma lived under Franco. Born in 1929 in Barcelona, Biedma was six when Federico Garcia Lorca was killed by Franco’s troops in Granada. Famously, the story goes that as they shot Lorca his murderers said: “Three shots in the ass for Garcia Lorca for being a faggot.” His body was never found. To be born gay under Franco and to write poems, created a crucible of refinement for Biedma. He was forced to lead a double life: he suffered from discrimination and blackmail. As he lay dying of AIDS in 1990, he said he had a rare tropical disease that he picked up in Manila. A lie to manage a grief. His mother called him a chameleon. One year later? Freddie Mercury of Queen, who sang “Under Pressure” with David Bowie, was dead: AIDS.

Biedma was a business executive from a conservative family, but in discreet circles he was openly gay: a campy dandy. He had traveled Europe and took a course in economics at Oxford. But he mainly stayed in Spain. Towards the end of his life, suffering from complications of AIDS he traveled to Paris for treatment like Rock Hudson, but eventually returned to Barcelona where he died. Biedma was 60. The poet James Merrill, another we lost from the AIDS pandemic, famously said he stood still while the closet dissolved around him. Biedma dissolved in the closet.

Yet fifteen years later, Spain legalized same-sex marriage: 4,500 same-sex couples married like that.

Silence carves these poems. He wrote his poems under a dictator who was famous for saying, “You are master of what you don’t say.” Maybe all poems are carved by silence. Think Dickinson. Think Hopkins. Silence can equal life. Here silence is particularly historic in a way it no longer is. Franco shut Spain up. The ground rich with unidentified corpses. Homosexuality denied in a regime that aligned itself with the conservative Catholic Church.

But poetry. Poetry provides a passport to transcendence when pressures seem unsurmountable: and more than thrice a poetry created under pressure in silence trumps death.

As Biedma began to put pen to paper, what preceded him was daunting. All the major poets had vanished: Machado on a death march, Lorca shot, Hernandez dead in prison, Cernuda fled to Mexico and never returned. Decades rolled on, censorship reigned, and torpid inertia smothered art.

Poetry produced under Franco was captured in the cult documentary classic, The Disenchantment. The film showed the dissolute Panero brothers, three bachelor poets fathered by Leopoldo Panero, a poet who betrayed his liberal origins working for Franco’s government. His fascist job turned his poems to drivel. All the verse of his drug-addicted boys unmemorable: the documentary showed how Franco killed art.

But poetry is resilient. Undetected in the moment, sometimes its unacknowledged state gives poems power. Reading Biedma’s If Only For a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again), masterfully translated by James Nolan, I read a poetry that survives under pressure, poetry that manages to build a privacy around an artist so his lyrics could breathe:

In Spain people huddled together at movies
and heating simply didn’t exist.

After so much bloodshed, it was a peace
that dawned in dirty rags, just as we
Spaniards had none of it for five years.
And an entire penniless continent
wormy with history and the black market,
suddenly looked much more like home.

Longing yearns for a lost Spain as our speaker longs for his youth. These poems don’t know Almodóvar will swagger down Calle Amor de Dios in a few years. Alaska will sing: ¿A quien le importa lo que yo haga?

Biedma is a Spanish Cavafy with his recurrent wish for his past which matches the atmosphere of the country where the poems are taking place: “Later he passes by without stopping/and thinks: another closed chapter.” The poem doesn’t offer release: the poem its own release.

Eliot to the bank, Kafka to insurance, Pessoa to his office, and Biedma working in his family’s business, the Philippine Tobacco Company. Except for business trips to Manila and stays in Oxford, he remained in Barcelona. Frank Bidart said Elizabeth Bishop looked like a Scarsdale matron in her later years. A disguise. Biedma went poetically undetected in a suit, tie, dress shoes, briefcase and his cigarette.

The bulk of his work written under censorship; he was not prolific. His works a slim column on the shelf. When asked about his output compared to other poets who produced more work, he said of his work, “It is briefer.” His greatest expectation was to have a box of his collected poems in a basement of the censor’s office. He came out with his collected poems fifteen years before he died and wrote some of his final poems in the third person. The last ten years he wrote no more poems. He disappears:

The only plot this play has got
is growing old and then dying.

He wrote for his own satisfaction and that shows on the poems. “The melancholy gaze of Antinous” looks out from many poems. His gay life half-hidden. How unnecessary such contortions are now. But we wouldn’t have what we have if poets like Biedma didn’t live through what they lived through. In that way, he’s heroic. At least, to me.

I spent a decade living in Madrid, between 2011 and 2021. Fifty years on, melancholy related to long deprivation lingered under the surface and spread across the days like mildew spread across the old walls of my apartment.

I was a new Episcopal priest and was asked to go to work for the Bishop of Spain. This tiny Episcopal cathedral had been shut under Franco and four of our priests shot, their bodies unrecovered. I was in my late forties when I arrived, late fifties when I left.

The sound of my own poems changed as I worked under the pressure of helping a poor church gain recognition and find funding. A kind of undramatic pressure, but pressure nonetheless. The Spanish Episcopal Church had most of their buildings confiscated by Franco and thus far no reparations. The Catholic Church continues to receive 1 billion euros a year for their programs. We received zero. Life is not fair, the Bible says so, and so will any poet worth reading.

In my off hours, I was charmed by the sounds of Spanish on TV, on the radio, through the phone, window and door, in books and in cafes. I fell in love with the place, the language, the people, and unequivocally, I fell for the Civil War poets.

Oddly, I found Biedma’s poems now, here in Wickford, Rhode Island, where I now work as a vicar for a parish by the sea. Time passes. AIDS is a distant memory for the young. But I am not young. I remember it.

We owe a debt to all the poets that come before us. Add Biedma to the list! Biedma outlasted Franco. Although the poems are forlorn, they offer hope in spite of themselves. They are poems that please nobody but themselves. That attracts me.

Reading the Spanish beside the English is like trying to separate the sea from the waves. The languid sound of Spanish propels its meaning in a manner wholly different from English: objects proceed verbs, the tongue rolls and the subjunctive takes up half your day. Nolan genuinely gets across the meaning from one language to the other. You can’t bring everything across, in fact you often leave a great deal behind when you translate. Like a priest who goes from country to country.

How wide the world. At the end of my street the harbor, beyond the harbor the sea, across the sea Spain. Another language. Another culture. Another history. Spain far away.

When I read these poems the Retiro, Franco’s tomb, the streets of Justicia, the languor of Chueca, my job at La Catedral del Redentor on Calle de la Benefiencia rush back.

Poetry remains indestructible. Poetry outlasts Franco and AIDS. So long as men and women can breathe museums will preserve artifacts and a poet like Biedma will add to the record of what life was like under oppression.

“I thought I wanted to be a poet but basically,” wrote Beidma, “I wanted to be the poem.” A Fernando Pessoa sentiment if ever there was one. O Dios mio, what humility emanates from the dusty Iberian peninsula! The place and poets changed me.

Biedma fills in what was lost. Under pressure.

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If Only For a Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again) by Jaime Gil de Biedma, translated by James Nolan, is available via Fonograf Editions.