SPAIN:	Leslie Stainton, An Author's Dream

By John Woodford

Leslie Stainton's triumph may be one-of-a-kind. It's unheard of for a staff member with neither an academic appointment nor a doctorate to get a major literary biography published by one major house, let alone two--and in the book capitals of London and New York at that.

It all began 14 years ago when Stainton, now a U-M staff member, was pursuing a master's degree in theater at the University of Massachusetts. For a class assignment, she wrote a dramatic script based on Poet in New York, the posthumously published (1940) volume of poems by the Spanish author Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936).

Lorca's poems grew out of his nine-month visit to New York in 1929-30, when his then-modest fame was mostly confined to Spain. Only nine years of life remained to Lorca, before Spanish fascist militiamen loyal to Francisco Franco seized and summarily executed him at age 38 during the Spanish Civil War. But in that span Lorca wrote most of his dramatic masterpieces (including Blood Wedding, Yerma, Dona Rosita the Spinster, and The House of Bernarda Alba). These and other plays, together with his collections of poetry (Poem of the Deep Song, Gypsy Ballads and others), have made Lorca a candidate for literary immortality.

Working on her script drew Stainton deeper into Lorca's life, and she applied for and won "indispensable support" from the Fulbright Program to spend two years (1984-86) in Spain to expand her project. Fortunately for Stainton, who had sharpened her skills with a seminar on biography taught by the historian Stephen B. Oates, her interest in Lorca coincided with the Lorca family's disclosing of 100 of the poet-playwright's previously undiscovered or unreleased letters as well as manuscripts, drawings, photographs and other materials.

Lorca's family made the new material available to Stainton and permitted her to help them edit some of Lorca's unpublished plays. The letters alone doubled those available to Lorca's previous major biographer, Ian Gibson.

In the years following her return to America, Stainton married, moved to Michigan, worked in a variety of staff writing, lecturing and editing jobs, divorced and, through it all, kept plugging away until she finished her book. Last fall, Bloomsbury Publishing of London brought out the 500-page first edition of Lorca: A Dream of Life. This spring, Stainton, who recently remarried, was awaiting publication of the American edition by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux of New York.

"I think my book attracted publishers because it was in time for the centenary of Lorca's birth and, in large part, because the new material shed considerable light on his complex relationship with his family and his complex personality," says Stainton, who is currently an editor in the U-M School of Public Health.

The reviewer for The Irish Times supported this view: "Because of the wealth of outside quotation the author can call upon, this quiet, responsible work is never forced. She does not indulge in speculation or presume to enter her subject's mind. ... Sensible and sensitive, this is a book of voices, the central one being that of Lorca himself. Biography has become a messy, dishonorable pursuit. This maligned genre has been somewhat redeemed by Leslie Stainton's valuable, insightful book."