En Las Montañas De Vermont: Los Exiliados En La Escuela Española De Middlebury College (1937-1963)

Capítulo 6. Ángel del Río: 1950-1954

1950

En la página de la red de la Fundación Federico García Lorca hay una cronología de la vida del poeta, y en ella, para el año 1919, encontramos lo siguiente:

Convence a su padre para que le permita trasladarse a Madrid, adonde llega en la primavera con cartas de presentación a Alberto Jiménez Fraud, director de la Residencia de Estudiantes, y Juan Ramón Jiménez, entre otros. Encuentro con sus amigos de Granada José Mora Guarnido y Ángel Barrios, instalados con anterioridad en Madrid, quienes lo introducen en los ambientes literarios. Frecuenta el café Gijón y trata a Ángel del Río, Guillermo de Torre, Adolfo Salazar, Gerardo Diego, Pedro Salinas, José de Ciria y Escalante. Vive primero “de pensión” en la calle San Marcos y en la calle del Espejo, hasta que, a primeros de octubre, se instala en la Residencia de Estudiantes, calle Pinar n. º 21, en los Altos del Hipódromo. (García Lorca, Federico)

Ángel del Río es, por tanto, una de las primeras personas que Federico conoce al llegar a Madrid, casi al mismo tiempo que a Pedro Salinas. Del Río había nacido en Soria (1901), en el corazón de Castilla. En esos años vivía allí el poeta Antonio Machado, que enseñaba francés en el colegio de segunda enseñanza de la ciudad, donde Del Río fue su discípulo (Río 1963, II, vi). Se traslada a Madrid para hacer sus estudios universitarios y allí conoce a todos los jóvenes poetas de su generación. Tan pronto termina sus estudios sale de España para enseñar en Francia; pasa luego a Puerto Rico, y en 1926, a los Estados Unidos, donde se incorpora al grupo de profesores que Federico de Onís reúne en Columbia University. Cuando en 1929 Federico García Lorca viene a Columbia ostensiblemente a estudiar inglés, es Ángel del Río con su esposa puertorriqueña, Amelia Agostini, quien con de Onís y su esposa le dan al joven poeta calurosa acogida.

En el pie de la foto 52, consultada en la página de la red de la Fundación Federico García Lorca, se dice de ella: “Federico García Lorca y Ángel del Río, fotografiados a través de un ventanal en el Central Park de Nueva York, en 1929”. Más bien que a través de un ventanal, parece que la foto fue sacada con una cámara de la época, en las que había que pasar a mano el rollo del negativo después de sacar una foto, pues de no hacerlo se superponía una foto sobre otra, como parece haber ocurrido aquí. Nótese que en la esquina inferior derecha aparece un bebé durmiendo, que bien puede haber sido el hijo de Ángel y Amelia Agostini, Miguel Ángel, a quienes vemos claramente en la foto de abajo, sacada en la casa de verano de los Del Río en las montañas Catskill, al noroeste de la ciudad de Nueva York, donde tenían una cabaña.

Sería Del Río, según Gibson, quien “en 1935 publicaría el primer estudio completo sobre su amigo [Federico García Lorca], aún valioso a pesar de las muchas lagunas y silencios” (248). En Columbia permanecerá Del Río, con algunos períodos de trabajo en otras universidades estadounidenses, hasta su muerte en 1962. Una larga excepción son los años de 1950 a 1954, durante los cuales enseñará en New York University. Durante este intermedio fuera de Columbia comienza su actividad de director de la Escuela Española, pero Columbia lo reclamará pronto para asumir la jefatura del departamento, del Instituto Hispánico y de la Revista Hispánica Moderna.

El primer verano de Del Río como director, el profesorado consistió, en casi su totalidad, en aquellos que ya habían estado en veranos anteriores. Del Río no había enseñado antes en la Escuela, aunque es muy probable que hubiera ido a visitar a amigos y conocidos, por lo que es lógico que en su primer verano quisiera continuar en la trayectoria trazada a través de los años por Centeno y mantenida por Casalduero. Francisco García Lorca (Paco para los amigos) también venía como profesor por primera vez, pero recordaremos que su familia había estado viniendo a Middlebury los veranos por una década, y él mismo se había casado con Laura de los Ríos en el campus en 1942. El nombre de su hermana, Isabel García Lorca, está en la lista de profesores para ese verano del Bulletin correspondiente (64), pero no la vemos en la foto del grupo porque había decidido regresar a España, según su sobrino, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, cuando describe en sus memorias su estancia de 1951 en Middlebury:

Mi tía Isabel había pasado varios meses del verano anterior [o sea, 1950] en España, la primera vez que volvía desde 1938, y en las conversaciones cada vez aparecía con más frecuencia el tema del regreso. Siempre había estado en el aire, claro está, como en todo exilio, pero había dejado de ser un desiderátum irrealizable; ahora era una posibilidad real. Insistía, por un lado, en la pobreza, la omnipresencia policial, eclesiástica y militar [. . .] ; por otro lado, pensaba [. . . ] en la mayor soltura económica que tendríamos. (Fernández Montesinos 152)

The visiting professor that summer of 1950 was José Manuel Blecua, who in Spain was still teaching at the secondary level, but whose work as researcher and editor had given him a solid reputation. When he was still a university student in 1933, he had won a scholarship to the summer university founded by Salinas in the La Magdalena Palace. There he met, besides Salinas, others like Navarro Tomás, Guillén, Federico García Lorca and many more. Because he was extremely hard of hearing, during the Spanish Civil War he was assigned to do health service. By 1946 his research work won him membership in the Real Academia Española (Ramos Nogales). His stay now in Middlebury helped him re-establish contact with old friends. An article in the Spanish newspaper El País, published on Saturday, March 22, 2003, tells the story of his re-encounter with Salinas:

Salinas probably didn’t remember the very young Blecua he had met in Santander in 1933, so he asked him: “You are Blecua? I thought you were older, bald, chubby, and wearing glasses.” Blecua answered immediately: “I am sorry, don Pedro. That picture corresponds to Dámaso Alonso.” (Llovet. “¿Usted es Blecua”)

And Dámaso Alonso was indeed as Salinas described.

The meeting of the two old friends had other happy consequences. Among the poems that Middlebury inspired in the poets who came in the summers, there were those prompted by Centeno’s death, sad and melancholy, as was to be expected. The summer of 1950 produced others completely different. In the same El País article that we have quoted, its author, Jordi Lovet, reports on some very funny rhymes that Salinas wrote to celebrate the end of the session and to say goodbye to his re-discovered friend. Llovet writes:

The last day of Blecua’s stay in Middlebury there was an end of the session party that turned into a Spree and an endearing farewell. On this occasion Salinas read aloud some doggerel that he had written in Blecua’s honor, and which the latter said he saved like “sheets of gold”.

Here we transcribe them along with Lovet’s notes. A literal translation is almost impossible because the verses are full of word games, some of them based on mispronunciations by Spaniards of English words; there are also allusions to literary history and word games that defy translation. The same applies to the “chotis”, a form of song popular in Madrid in the late 19th century. Salinas used the music from a song, "Pichi," in a popular “zarzuela”, Las Leandras, but wrote his own lyrics:

Llorando de erudición
nace Blecua en Aragón.
Aún andar no se le ve
y [ya] pone notas al pie.
(Que con la pelota, antes,
juega con las variantes.)
Sus juguetes favoritos,
[infolios] y manuscritos.
Sus pasos los dirigía
todos por cuaderna vía.
Le llaman, por darle mimo,
tetrástrofo monorrimo.
Su abuelita, en vez del coco,
dice: "Que viene el barroco".
Si a un perro le ofrece pan,
le dirá: "Tomad, Boscán".
Ingresa en el Instituto
y aprende el anacoluto.
Se pasa varios milenius
leyendo glosas de Xenius.
Se pone por penitencia
leer a Hurtado y Palencia.
Arma una marimorena
por un Juan de más o Mena.
En Madrid o en Zaragoza
oscuros textos desbroza.
Acaba su vida errática
en profesor de gramática.
Le atiza un sobresaliente
al que sabe a Gil Vicente.
A este, dice, no le paso;
no conoce a Garcilasso.
A ese: vuelva en setiembre,
no sabe el verso bimembre.
Ignorante tan intonso,
que lea a Dámaso Alonso.
Antologías escribe [t]
famosas hasta en el Tíbet.
Edita a los Argensola
sin sola una coca-cola. (1)
Transportado en avïón,
llega a orillas del Hudsón.
En las tiendas de juguetes
gasta dimes (2) y diretes.
Llama la atención su pinta
elegante por la Quinta.
Luego a Middlebury arriba
y zumos de lata liba.
[Anda el dinámico Blecua
siempre, aquí, de Ceca en Meca.]
A las horas de comer
se le ve palidecer.
De pena se queda mudo
ante menú tan menudo.
[La mirada le retoza
al ver a una buena moza.]
Y ahora a castigar la glotis
ofreciéndole este chotis.

[El juglar de Maryland]

1. Nota de Blecua: [Barbaridad]. De hecho, los dos versos de Salinas, corregidos por aquél, dicen: "Y sin beber cocacolas / se edita a los Argensolas." 2. Nota de Blecua: [Moneda de 10 centavos].

CHOTIS

Blecua
es baturro que castiga,
del Pilar a Middlebury
no ha quedado una cantiga
a que no le saque miga
con estilo y con primor.
Blecua
coge silvas y soneptos
y les saca los conceptos
y entre comidas de bote
él aclara a Don Quijote
y dolora a Campoamor.
Blecua
o comenta a Juan de Mena
castigándose la glotis
o se agarra a una morena
para marcarse unos chotis
que ni el mejor Cejador.
Blecua
con su sordera y su labia
tiene a las chicas en Babia.
Si echa mano a la estilística
no hay una que se resística
a su verbo arrollador.
Duro con él,
dale a Gracián,
José Manuel.
Anda que te ondulen
con la pelmanén
y pa suavizarte, que te den Rubén.
Se lo pués pedir a Jorge Guillén
porque a don Ramón
no ha nacido quién.

[El anónimo de Baltimore]
(Llovet 2003b)

Blecua refused to publish them while he was alive, perhaps fearful that if those compositions were known they would blemish Salinas’ reputation. They were finally printed after his death. The little poems illustrate the laid-back, relaxed and fun environment that atttracted so many to teach in Middlebury.

The summer seems to have been full of exchanges of this type. We find another example in a little theater piece written and presented on August 4, and about which we learn from Eugenio Florit in a memorial he wrote when Navarro Tomás died:

I will always remember an evening when we put on a very funny work written for the occasion by Paco García Lorca and Jorge Mañach entitled “Dangerous Consonances or the triumph of Hispanism”, and that its authors called “a farce”. That was on August 4, 1950. Some of the characters and performers were: Doña Meter, Amelia [Agostini de] del Río; don Hispanicus, Emilio González López; Modernism, Ángel del Río; and Ultraism, Francisco García Lorca. Pilar de Madariaga also had a role, as did other friends. The work was based on the literary fights between Modernism and Ultraism (or Vanguardism) in our literatures, with some very opportune jokes about the books of phonetics of don Tomás that amused him a lot. (Florit)

It was in this little play where Blecua and Florit had a bit of dialogue that became memorable among members of the audience. Again we quote Florit:

I have never seen Navarro laugh so hard as in an “ad lib” scene that José Manuel Blecua and I did where both of us played deaf people, which, sad to say, was the case anyway—although Blecua was more deaf than I, of course. We came on stage, we said a few silly things, without understanding each other, including this bit: “Are you going to the library? –No, I am going to the library. –Ah, I thought you were going to the library” which made don Tomás laugh so hard that it was a joy to see. (Florit)

The joke was enjoyed by all. A student who was at the presentation, Robert Morrison, has donated to the College library the program that was distributed at the entrance, which has the complete text of the work. In a note on the page where the cast was listed, he wrote: “The names of the actors of Scene 6 were not included here. Their scene was the highlight of the performance, as poet Eugenio Florit and scholar José Manuel Blecua made fun of their limited ability to hear clearly” (Morrison, Robert).


The little play had many references to the professors who were there at that time. Judging by “Scene Four,” that summer many of them got sick; looking back with the knowledge of later events, it is clear that there was a problem:

“Segundino [played by Manuel Fernandez-Montesinos]: What has happened to you, Modernisto, you look like a lame horse?

Modernisto [Angel de Río]: It’s nothing. A mild lumbago, making its rounds…

Segundino: Well, then, with Margot [posibly Margarita de Pombo], Amelia [Agostini de del Río], Don Pedro [Salinas] and you, man, this looks like a hospital, already! (Robert Morrison 6)

It was obvious, then, that Salinas was not in good health.

The staging of plays of every kind has been a favored co-curricular activity since the beginning of the School. Dramas, comedies, musicals, floral games—all kinds of spectacles found enthusiastic participants and public among professors and students. Manuel Fernández'Montesinos remembered fondly his theater work and in his memoirs included a photo of himself and several actors dressed for the play quoted above:

This first summer of del Río’s directorship was, in Freeman’s words: “a great summer, even an unforgettable one . . . .  Not even in Spain could you have found a gathering of men and women such as these” (338).

1951
The picture of Salinas taken in Middlebury the summer of 1951 and which appears in the book commemorating the centenary of his birth, published by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, shows us a tired don Pedro sitting on a rocking chair as if he were waiting for the visit of friends, without a tie, but warmly dressed for a summer afternoon.

The background for this is in Jaime Salinas autobiography. He describes how during the academic year 1950-51 at Johns Hopkins, where don Pedro was teaching and Jaime was finishing his BA, his father was taken to the hospital where he was diagnosed with a sciatica attack which forced him to use a cane (443). Jaime continues:

When the graduation date was announced, my father’s health had not improved. It was decided that my mother and my sister [Solita]—Juan [Marichal, who by then was at Harvard] would take the young ones from Cambridge—would spend the summer in Middlebury with my father, where he would enjoy the company of friends. A few days before he departed for Vermont he had a relapse, but he insisted on traveling. He had to be taken by ambulance to the station, but a few days after he was sitting in the garden of the little house they had rented, playing with his grandchildren and receiving friends in the afternoons. (445)

In the 1951 Bulletin neither Salinas nor Marichal nor any other member of the family is listed, which suggests that Pedro and Margarita had gone to Middlebury only with the hope that rest would help with whatever health issue was affecting don Pedro. It didn’t turn out that way:

At the end of the session, with my father not showing any improvement, and on the advice of many, it was decided that he would not return to Baltimore, but rather go to Cambridge to consult the doctors of the Massachusetts General Hospital.

In Cambridge, don Pedro and Margarita would be close to Solita and Juan, who lived there with their two children:

What was most disconcerting is that there was no way to get the doctors to tell us clearly what was happening to my father. The sciatica theory was ruled out, but that was all they would say. At the beginning of November we had a phone call from Dr. Olleros in Puerto Rico . . . in which he assumed that we had been told that my father had a disease then unknown: bone marrow cancer, and at a very advanced stage. (446-47)

Don Pedro died on December 4, a few days after his 60th birthday. With him disappeared one of the main links between the School and the community in exile from both the Civil War and the dictatorship of General Franco.

The exiles would continue to come to the School, though, and that year of 1951 almost all were repeat visitors. Even the visiting professor from Spain, Manuel García Blanco, had already taught in Middlebury on three previous summers, before Salinas arrived—1932, 1935 an 1936. He was from Salamanca and had studied at its university with Unamuno, and then in Madrid with Menéndez Pidal and Américo Castro. In 1934 he went back to Salamanca to take over the History of Language chair left vacant by his teacher, Miguel de Unamuno (García Blanco). In Middlebury he would coincide with his teacher’s daughter, María de Unamuno. Freeman mentions the presence of García Blanco in his memoir: “He taught courses on the Romancero and on the old and modern dialects of the Spanish world. His generous unselfish interest in Middlebury’s project in Spain, and his vigorous charm as a colleague and teacher put the whole school greatly in his debt” (1975, 340).

The “project” to which Freeman refers was the establishment of a graduate program in Spain. In the chapter entitled “Graduate School of Spanish in Spain, 1951—“ (1975, 237-246), Freeman describes with careful detail the efforts made to start a program in Spain. Ángel del Río and Sam Guarnaccia were the engine behind the efforts since 1949, when they began to mention the possibility of a Spanish site. Del Río travelled to Madrid to initiate contacts at the beginning of 1951, and by October of that year, the School in Spain got going. The original plan was for the students to spend a first semester at the University of Madrid, and the second semester in Salamanca. During his 1951 stay in Middlebury, García Blanco, who was also secretary of the University of Salamanca, had coordinated that part of the plan with del Río. Once in Madrid, however, it was obvious that after spending the first semester getting used to a new culture, a new university and a new city, students didn’t want to repeat the process in Salamanca, and that part of the project was abandoned. “Dr. García-Blanco was most understanding and reasonable,” writes Freeman (1975, 241).

The program, initially affiliated with the University of Madrid, soon became independent and all its classes began to meet in spaces rented at the International Institute, on 8, Miguel Ángel Street. Some of the professors who were hired to teach there could not do so at the University for political reasons, so the program in Madrid, just like the program in Middlebury, was a kind of refuge for a different kind of exile, the “interior exile.” Isabel García Lorca (225), who had by then gone back to Spain with part of the family, began to teach in the Madrid program, and when Paco decided that he could return to Spain, he did so as director of the program for the second semester of the 1963-64 academic year. Conversely, some of the Madrid professors would come to Middlebury in the summers. Thus a very fruitful exchange was established that continues to this day.

The members of the García Lorca family that appear on the group photo are the “Sra. de Montesinos,” that is to say, Concha, the poet’s sister and widow of the assassinated mayor of Granada, Manuel Fernández Montesinos. This would be her last summer, as she would soon return to Spain with her three children. Paco García Lorca was also in Middlebury, as was his wife, Laura de los Ríos.

As we have mentioned, the staging of plays had been a very popular co-curricular activity since the beginning of the School. Concha’s son, Manuel, whom we saw the previous summer as an actor in Doña Gramática, emphasized in his memoirs the importance of theater in the life of the School:

In addition to the regular work of classes and music on the lawn, that year was full of stage presentations. . . . They took place on Fridays and were always packed with attentive audiences. In the six weeks of the session we had three presentations, on the 6 and the 13 of July and on August 3. After the presentation of July 6 we had only one week to prepare for the evening of the 13, including the scenary and the costumes. The most successful and the one with which we closed the theater program was the comic sketch El santo de Isidra, by Carlos Arniches, in which the protagonist was Isidra herself, Aunt Laura. My mother played Mrs. Ignacia; my uncle Paco, Epifanio; Ángel del Río, Mr. Eulogio; my sister Conchita played Baltasara and I, Pérez, a new recruit who courted La Cirila, played by the very beautiful Carmen del Río. In the play my sister Tica played a role also, and since the cast was vast—no less than 23 actors and actresses, we had to recruit eight students of the School who had very funny accents.  In each of the first two presentations we premiered two one-act plays of the Mexican writer and academic Emilio Abreu Gómez  [sic. The writer's first name is Ermilo. He taught in the School several summers (1951 Bulletin, 53)] In addition, we staged Rosina es frágil, by Martínez Sierra, Sangre gorda, by the brothers Quintero, which Conchita and I interpreted, and Del secreto bien guardado, by Casona.  (Fernández-Montesinos 157-58)

As can be gathered by the above, theater was a very intense, time-consuming activity, and even the individual performances were packed with content material. To give an idea, we include a copy of a program for a typical evening in 1954, where we can see that in addition to the plays, there were also musical interludes.

All of this was made possible by the cooperation of the wives of faculty members who sometimes were also teachers in the session. Such was the case with Laura de los Ríos de García Lorca and Amelia Agostini de del Río, who were actresses, directors, and in general the backbone of the theater program during their summers in Middlebury—and indeed in Barnard College during the academic year.

Diego Catalán was a new Spanish professor who doesn’t appear in the group photo but is on the faculty list. He is well-connected to “institucionismo”—from birth, as it were (Sánchez Ron). His grandfather was don Ramón Menéndez Pidal and his mother, Jimena Menéndez Pidal. As noted in her obituary written for the newspaper El País by Rafael Castillo, another professor of the School, she had been “A student at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza . . . one of the last persons to have received lessons directly from Giner de los Ríos and Manuel Bartolomé Cossío” (Castillo). Jimena passed along to her son, Diego, the institucionista ideals that she had received from the founders, as she was his teacher. In the post-war period, Jimena again infused new life in the primary and secondary schools that had been established by the Insitución before the war but had been eliminated by the victors. However, she prudently used a new name, the Colegio-Estudio, which continues the Institución’s educational mission in its campus on the outskirts of Madrid. Professors and students from the Colegio would teach in the Spanish School many years later. Diego’s father, Miguel Ángel Catalán, was the scientist in whose laboratory Pilar de Madariaga had worked before the Spanish Civil War.

1951 is the last summer in which some of the García Lorca family would use Middlebury as a summer home for the whole family. When Isabel finally convinced her mother, her sister Concha and her three children to return to Spain and live in Madrid, Paco, Laura and their two daughters decided to stay. As his nephew Manuel writes: “for my aunt and uncle, particularly for uncle Paco, to be on Spanish soil again was an uphill struggle" (Fernández Montesinos 174). For that reason, in 1953, the family in Spain and the family in the United States would summer in a rented house in the Côte d’Azur, near Cannes, in France (174).

1952

The faculty for this year follows the same pattern of combining veterans with some new names—although at least one was neither new nor a professor. Such is the case with José Fernández Montesinos. He doesn’t appear in the faculty list in the Bulletin for 1952, nor in the list of courses.  He is in the group photo, however, identified as “Sr. Montesinos.” His appearance corresponds with the description that his colleagues at the University of California gave of him in the obituary note that they wrote almost twenty years later: “No figure excited more curiosity on the Berkeley campus than José Fernández Montesinos, with his unkempt silver hair, one black lens in his glasses, hands clasped behind him, and nose raised high to escape at least some of the fumes from his eternal cigarette” (Morby, Askins, Herr). Fernández Montesinos, from Granada, a university friend of Federico García Lorca, had also studied at the Centro de Estudios Históricos, where his teacher was Américo Castro. His brother Manuel was the mayor of Granada assassinated at the beginning of the war, which made José a brother-in-law of the García Lorcas. That summer he was, then, the only member of the family in attendance. The fact that he does not appear in any of the lists may indicate that he came to Middlebury as a guest to give some lectures or to visit friends—his wife was a professor at Bennington College, just two hours south of Middlebury, and he came East to spend summers there.

There were other friends of the García Lorca family there. Manuel Pizarro was also from Granada and also a former student at the Centro de Estudios Históricos. He had been a professor in Japan and Romania, and during the war he was a diplomat representing the Republican government—his last government post towards the end was as a consul in San Francisco. Like Paco García Lorca he taught in New York City institutions like Brooklyn College and The New School. He had already been in Middlebury in 1942 (Bulletin 1952 53). Isabel wrote some heartfelt words about him in her memoirs, which indicate that the ties of friendship among the García Lorca, Montesinos and Pizarro families were close:

Guillén loved to tell the story that the three university friends—Pizarro, Pepe [José] Fernández Montesinos and my brother Federico—used to be described this way, “One is the handsome one [Pizarro], the other (that is, José) the clever one, and the other, the poor thing, nothing” And he laughed and opened his arms as if saying: What nonsense! To him it was the best comment that had been made about Federico. “Nothing!” (239)

Del Río then had made possible another reunion of the García Lorca family.  Another member of the extended Spanish School family invited by del Río had been here earlier, in 1947.  It was Augusto Centeno, and we have seen in the exchanges of letters between Salinas and Guillén that they didn’t have a favorable opinion of him and considered him the cause of Juan Centeno’s melancholy and even death. Maybe del Río was not aware of the details because the Guillen-Salinas correspondence was not published until much later, in 1992. By the time he arrived in Middlebury again, Augusto had left Princeton and was teaching at the University of Colorado. Another veteran, this one of the summers of 1942 and 1943, was Camila Henríquez Ureña, who was still teaching at Vassar.

Del Río continued the tradition of bringing at least two distinguished guest professors, one from Spain and the other from Spanish America. Centeno was the “visiting” from Spain; from Spanish America came Aníbal Sánchez Reulet, an Argentinian philosopher, who at the time was chief of the Philosophy, Sciences and Letters section of the Pan American Union in Washington, DC. He would later join the faculty of UCLA. Like many professors in the School he was also an exile, in his case from the dictatorship of Juan Domingo Perón (Benítez).

We know from Freeman that there were four theater presentations that summer, but he only gives the title of two of them without further details except that they were directed by Amelia Agostini de del Río. Freeman attended the theater presentations of the Spanish School and continued doing so after he retired and almost until the year of his death in 1999, at the age of 101.
One of the works this summer of 1952 was “a polished presentation” of the 1909 work Doña Clarines, by the Quintero brothers. The other play was a much more recent work, La fuente del arcángel, having been written by Pedro Salinas and premiered by the theater group of Barnard College on February 16, 1951, with the author in attendance. Some of the members of the New York presentation may also have participated in the Middlebury version: the Barnard cast consisted of Concha García Lorca de Fernández-Montesinos, Carmen del Río (daughter of Ángel del Río and Amelia Agostini), Isabel García Lorca de los Ríos, Amelia Agostini, Eugenio Florit, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, Concha Fernández-Montesinos (Salinas 1991, 154). The close relations between the Spanish School and the departments of Spanish at Columbia University (Barnard College, Columbia College, School of General Studies, the Graduate Faculties) are very apparent in the theater programs. Salinas’ play shared the stage that February of 1951 with Ligazón, by the Spanish novelist and playwright Ramón del Valle Inclán, which had been presented at Middlebury in the previous summer, in 1950, no doubt with a similar cast (Freeman 1975, 340-1).

Of the intense theater activity that summer we have evidence from a not too clear photo in which we see Ángel del Río, on the left, and Eugenio Florit, on the right, with an actress who could have been del Río’s daughter, Carmen. The work’s title is not recorded.

That summer of 1952 was the last one for Tomás Navarro Tomás. He would be one of those exiles who would die without returning to Spain. His classroom teaching and his research work had continued in exile, and through them he had done a great deal to spread the influence of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Navarro Tomás).

1953

This was, in Freeman’s words, “a brilliant summer” (1975, 341). For what would be his last as director, del Río invited one of the most prominent intellectuals in exile, the man who had been the professor of many who had taught in the School and others who were still in its faculty. It was Américo Castro who, as we have read in Isabel García Lorca’s memoirs, would never have invited back by Juan Centeno because he spoke English with students in a previous visit in 1941, when he came to give a series of lectures (235). Now he returned, loaded with honors, including the French Legion of Honor, and others listed in a curriculum that took up almost half a page in that summer’s Bulletin. This time, however, he was going to teach the full session.

The “family” gathered again, including parents and children. Jorge Guillén came to visit his son, Claudio, who was teaching in the School fresh from getting his doctorate at Harvard. Claudio’s friend, Jaime Salinas, was also in the faculty, as was his brother–in-law, Juan Marichal, his wife, Solita Salinas, and their two boys, Carlos and Miguel, who had brought much joy to don Pedro’s last summer. The Baralts and the Alvarez-Morales, from Cuba, and the poet Eugenio Florit, also from Cuba, had been coming for a number of years, as was the case with many of the other professors, including the indispensable Joaquín Casalduero.

The theater program, organized by Amelia Agostini de del Río while her husband was director, was particularly brilliant that summer. We have photographs of two of the plays presented. One was by Federico García Lorca, La zapatera prodigiosa.

The other for which we have a picture was a short one-act play by Cervantes, El juez de los divorcios.

From the beginning of the School, plays had been presented mostly in the College’s Playhouse, a wooden building somewhat far away from the dorms and other College dependencies, on Weybridge Street. On the 23 of December of that year, it burned to the ground. It would take five years for Wright Theater, the new stone and cinder block structure to be completed. During the construction period the auditorium in the old gymnasium at McCullough was used for theatricals, as well as other venues.
Del Río’s resignation must have come as a surprise to many. Freeman accepted it “to our deep regret” and wrote that del Río was someone “with whom it was a joy to work” (1975, 342). The years of del Río’s directorship coincided with those in which he was teaching at New York University, in downtown Manhattan; now Columbia wanted him back as professor, head of the Department, director of the Casa Hispánica, of its Hispanic Institute and its publications—it was a heavy load. This was the reason he gave for leaving the Spanish School, and which Freeman communicates to President Stratton in his annual report of October 1: “the pressure of his duties during the winter at Columbia University, to which he is returning after three years at New York University; [plus] personal obligations which will take him and his wife to Spain more frequently during the summer” (1953). Officially, del Río would be on sabbatical during the summer of 1954: “He has indicated his willingness to continue as Director during the winter, and to supervise the complete plans, the hiring of faculty, and the organization of courses for the summer of 1954”, writes Freeman, and above all:

We have discussed several possibilities for an Acting Director during the summer of 1954 . . . . It is then contemplated that we will recommend that Dr. Francisco Garcia-Lorca, a member of our Spanish staff in 1951 and 1953, and Visiting Lecturer at New York University, be appointed as Director of the Spanish Summer School effective October 1, 1954. . . . [Dr. García-Lorca] is willing to consider the appointment, but cannot accept it for the summer of 1954 since he is obligated to return to Spain for the summer. (“Informe 1953”)

This was one of the consequences of the fact that it was becoming easier for exiles to return to Spain, no doubt caused by the improvement in relations between the Franco regime and the Eisenhower administration, which would culminate in the treaty that would allow the US to build and operate several bases in Spain to combat the new common enemy in the Cold War. We have seen how Isabel García Lorca had returned permanently to Spain with members of her family in 1950; Jorge Guillén would also visit. These changes in the political situation affected the School in two ways—on the one hand it made it easier for exiles to return to Spain, if only for the summers, which made hiring them more difficult; on the other, it was also easier to bring professors who lived in Spain to the US for a summer of teaching. For the moment, Freeman’s problem was to find someone to take over the directorship while waiting for the arrival of Paco García Lorca.

1954
Joaquín Casalduero came to the rescue, as he had done once before in 1949. He would be in charge of the day-to-day decisions; the program itself and the faculty to teach it had been put together by del Río. Casalduero had been with the School during a good portion of its history. The Bulletin for 1954 lists him as being here in 1932, 1933, 1935 through 1949, 1951 and 1953. His capacity for work was legendary. This summer as Director he also taught two courses, and during the decade of the 40’s, when he spent the summers in Middlebury, he published a book every couple of years, two of them about Cervantes. Gonzalo Sobejano, a professor at Columbia, has written about him:

Casalduero was the first to give Spaniards the path they needed to properly understand Galdós [Spain’s great XIX century novelist]; he was also the first . . .  to analyze and synthesize the meaning of each of Cervantes’ works; the first to explore as a whole Guillén’s Cántico; the first to devote to Espronceda [a poet of the early Romantic period in Spain] and his greatest poem, books worthy of that great poet, whose work had been much misunderstood; the first to recognize the novelistic worth of Gabriel Miró [a novelist of the XX century] . . . and the first to analyze the theater of the Golden Age in a way that allows us to recognize its structural characteristics. This all means that he has done work on the vanguard in many many fields, without imitating any one, doing away with clichés and breaking away from fossilized criteria. 

What is notable in this case is that all that activity, which reframes the evaluation of works and authors and the systems for their study and analysis, has been developed quietly--not unnoticed, but only alluded to or even silenced than exposed to the fumes of propaganda or polemical storms. (Sobejano)

Sobejano’s evaluation of Casalduero’s work methods closely matches the latter’s background which, as we have seen before (21), was the product of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza.

In a more indirect fashion, that was also the background of the visiting professors for that summer, Aurelio Viñas, from Spain, and Raimundo Lida, from Argentina. With these appointments, maybe not intentionally, but rather inevitably, del Río showed the spread of Institutionist ideas through, above all, the Centro de Estudios Históricos, its founder, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and those who worked with him. Historian Aurelio Viñas had been one of these colleagues. He graduated from the University of Madrid, and in 1923 organized Hispanic studies at the University of Paris, where he co-founded and co-directed the Institute d’Etudes hispaniques at the Sorbonne, and oversaw the career of many French Hispanists. He remained in France until after the end of the Second World War, when he returned to Spain, first to the University of Sevilla; from there he came to Middlebury and, upon his return to Spain, joined the faculty at the University of Valladolid. Like his old colleague Americo Castro, he also received the Legion of Honor from the French government (Aubrun 137-138).

The links of Raimundo Lida with “institucionismo” were not as direct. Lida was born of Jewish parents in the city of Lemberg, in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which today, as Lviv, is part of Ukraine. They emigrated to Argentina in 1908 when Raimundo had not yet celebrated his first birthday (Barrenechea 517). The language first spoken by one of the most renowned authorities in Spanish linguistics was Yiddish (Gómez Bravo 723). His schooling shows the transoceanic reach of Institutionist ideas. In Buenos Aires, Lida was a student of the Spanish philologist and literary critic, Amado Alonso, and then they worked together. This points to an interesting parallel—in a manner reminiscent of the time the president of Columbia University accepted the recommendation of Ramón Menéndez Pidal to appoint Federico de Onís to head the graduate program at Columbia which led eventually to the creation of the influential Hispanic Institute, it was also Ramón Menéndez Pidal who recommended Américo Castro to the University of Buenos Aires in 1923 to organize its Instituto de Filología. Castro did that and in 1927 left Amado Alonso as his successor, another Institutionist (Lida).  The ideas and the work methods of the Institución arrived in the Americas almost at the same time, and the people responsible for their spread would meet again in North America. Politics, again, in this case the dictatorship of Perón in Argentina, would send into exile first Amado Alonso, and then Raimundo Lida, both eventually to Harvard.  Lida would also follow Alonso as head of the Harvard department. While in Buenos Aires, at the Instituto de Filología, Lida had worked with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, whose brother, Max, had been at the Spanish School in 1947, and whose sister, Camila, had also taught in Middlebury. Del Río obviously hired Lida to take over the courses in linguistics previously taught by Navarro Tomás.

There was continuity in other del Río appointments—Jaime Salinas and his brother-in-law, Juan Marichal; the latter at that moment was teaching in Bryn Mawr College but would soon move to Harvard. Both were in the faculty at Middlebury that summer. Jaime had lived an adventurous life up until then, which he narrates in his autobiography, Travesías, a book with much information about his years in Middlebury. The chronology, however, is a little off on some of the events, as we have seen in the case of the year when Cernuda was in Middlebury. He is aware of this and writes on page 483: “I have spent so many summers in Middlebury that it is very difficult for me to diferentiate among them or reconstruct the chronological order. Of the summer of 1952 I remember that I joined the faculty and began to get paid a salary of $250.” Jaime was not in Middlebury as a faculty member in 1952, but in 1953 and 1954. What we get from Jaime, and others, are impressions, opinions, memories—all very valuable—about the people they met in summers in Middlebury. For example,  Jaime’s notes on the summer of 1954 relate when he had to share a suite in Hepburn Hall with Raimundo Lida, about whom he writes of a very emotional event that took place and which we quote in its entirety [Note: R. Ruiz, a long-time faculty member at the Spanish School disagrees with some of the details of the version below. Archival evidence corroborates some of his comments]:

I was annoyed to have as suite mate a mythical character about whom I had heard speak at home with the greatest respect and admiration. But from the first I discovered that he was a person of extraordinary delicacy and kindness . . . He always showed a fatherly interest in me. He understood my tribulations, my doubts and my lack of direction about the future. He listened to me patiently, without giving me easy solutions, and he made me feel comfortable and protected. One of those shared afternoons, someone knocked on the door to our room and gave me an open telegram. It was from Auntie Andrea and it informed me that my mother had died peacefully in her sleep the night before. All I could think of doing was to give the telegram to Lida, who embraced me. We were like that a while without saying a word. For that embrace, so warm and full of wisdom, I shall be grateful to him all my life. Without a word, without a tear, everything was said. (489-90)

Jaime Salinas and his sister Solita, and their friend Claudio Guillén, were members of that generation who had left Spain as children and their schooling had taken place in the United States. An even bigger group of exiles had gone to Mexico, where their children had received their education. Now, in 1954, one of the members of that “second generation” arrived. He was Roberto Ruiz (Madrid, 1925), the son of Spanish exiles who had gone to Mexico when Ruiz was still a child, and there he had done his schooling. In 1959 he joined the faculty of the Middlebury College Spanish Department during the winter college. His work in the summers would include the theater and music programs. His narrative work began in those years; he has written several novels on the theme of exile (Piña Rosales).

In the annual report of the summer director, Casalduero calls attention to another worrisome trend. That year there were 15 fewer students than in the previous summer. He attributes the drop to more competition from programs in the United States, Spanish America and Spain. He proposes as a solution that in the future, publicity for the School should emphasize the quality of education in the summer program, and the success of the MA and doctoral programs that Middlebury had in Madrid, which attracted many students and had a well-established record of four years of operation (Report). This seems to Casalduero like a great achievement, which from the point of view of the academic program was true enough, but which didn’t take into account the fact that those graduate students who went to Spain could finish their required courses for the MA in a year’s time. This meant that they would not be on campus for the three additional years following the summer of admission. That had to have an effect on the summer enrollment numbers. The problem then—and now—is that the number of students recruited has to be large enough to keep two (or more) instructional sites solvent. This was achieved the following year.

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