There's always a moment of quiet satisfaction when you figure something out. That magical instant when you get confirmation that two people did indeed meet and you think bingo.
Today was a quiet day, devoted to reading, laundry, a little shopping, and a walk in the sunshine. In fact, the only interesting thing I did was go and visit the British Cemetery and take pictures, in anticipation of a blog entry about the same. It definitely deserves said entry, but perhaps I'll do that closer to Halloween.
I started playing around with research after getting home around sunset from a walk, simply because it was too early to have dinner. (I try to keep on Spanish hours when I'm here, and although it's still abnormally warm weather, the sun sets around 8:00 now, and it's pretty dark by 8:30.) A few people had recommended the Residencia de Estudiantes archive to me, as the natural complement to the Residencia de Señoritas, and even though I spent a couple of days there a couple of years ago, and know that sadly their online finding aid has little about Langston Hughes, I thought it couldn't hurt to add in Dorothy Peterson's name, and perhaps simply type in Fuente Ovejuna/Fuenteovejuna since that's the translation I'm pursuing info about at the moment for my Peterson chapter.
As I expected there were no hits (although I was amused to see that when I searched for "Dorothy" alone I found a translation of a work about Montessori Education by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who I am fond of as a children's novelist, in addition to Dorothy Parker, who I know was in Spain during the war, albeit briefly). Then I decided, despairing, to go back to looking for Rafael Alberti, since I know he knew Hughes well, and I know that any search in the Edad de Plata archives of the generation of '27 is sure to feature him, even though his work is rather dispersed. I was able to filter the search to "documentos" instead of published books, and noted a series of letters between him and one Gustavo Durán Martínez, spanning the time period I was interested in.
Time to open another tab in the browser.
Gustavo Durán Martínez, according to his ever useful Wikipedia page, was a trained composer, who worked for Paramount Pictures in Spain before the war, and gained a certain reputation as a musician. So...exactly the sort of person who would have common interests with Langston Hughes, also tangentially involved with films, and extremely interested in music. During the war, Durán became a commander of a mixed brigade, and then an officer of the (somewhat infamous) Servicio de Investigación Militar (the intelligence division of the Spanish Republican Army). He escaped Spain in 1939, and went...to New York City. Where he worked for the State Department until his past and Senator McCarthy caught up with him, at which point he worked for the United Nations instead. He went on diplomatic missions for the US to Cuba and Argentina. My conviction that he must have known Langston Hughes was strengthened. They simply had too many common locations and interests to have not met.
I ran Durán's name through the Residencia archive search engine and found a ton of hits (of course) including a number of notes on the folklore and folk music of Latin America. No way he could have not known Langston Hughes.
Time to open yet another tab in the browser. This time I did a google search for Gustavo Durán Martínez AND Langston Hughes.
And bingo. In an online edition of a magazine of Perfiles de la Cultura Cubana I found an article "Charla con el comandante Durán," clearly a reprint of earlier reminiscences of Durán (who died in 1969 in Athens) from his time at the Alianza de Intelectuales in Madrid. After describing Durán's impromptu piano concert at the Alianza the narrator writes "Una noche, después de la parca cena con los compañeros de siempre, —Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Nicolás Guillén, Langston Hughes, Juan Chabás, Vicente Salas Víu, Daniela Díaz, Antonio Aparicio, Ontañón, Rosario del Olmo, Xavier Farias, Destroyer…— plantamos al jefe de la División Durán un formal cerco periodístico."
Bingo. In addition to the confirmation, I now have a set of definite names to search for, since given Langston Hughes's almost pathological discretion, he names very few names in his memoir, beyond Alberti and Maria Teresa Leon, who were close friends, and El Destroyer, an orphaned young teenager, who got his nickname from his incredible ability to accidentally break things (plates, cups, glasses, chairs, and -- to Hughes' intense sadness -- scratch precious and difficult to replace phonograph records), but whom no one had the heart to reprimand, since he was always pathetically apologetic, and since he had lost his entire family in a bombing raid. (Hughes doesn't say whether El Destroyer's tendency to break things was normal adolescent clumsiness animated by unconscious rage, or whether the poor kid literally had physical tremors from the trauma he'd suffered, but he makes clear that he was considered somewhat "special" by all of the people at the Alianza, and that they kind of adopted him as a mascot.)
A quick check of the Residencia de Estudiantes catalogue again confirms that Gustavo Durán Martínez's archives are there, or at least a considerable number of them. I foresee a trip to the Residencia to read the letters of this musician, turned soldier, turned spy, turned diplomat. I'll be interested in seeing what he had to say (if anything) about the people I'm interested in.
Let's hope the piano man sings.
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