Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

===Aleixandre===

One of the first things that Cernuda did on arriving in Madrid in 1928 was to pay a visit to Vicente Aleixandre.<ref name=Cernuda633 />  This was their first meeting.  However, they did not immediately become friends and Cernuda blames it on his own timidity and distrust.<ref name="Cernuda2201">Cernuda: OCP vol 2 Vicente Aleixandre (1950) p 201</ref>  He was struck by Aleixandre's warmth and friendliness, not realising until a later date that his visit had been during the hours when Aleixandre, for the sake of his health, would normally have been resting. Unfortunately he was also struck by Aleixandre's calmness and the sense of ease that he exuded at being in familiar surroundings.  For Cernuda, who was always uneasy about feeling at home anywhere, this was a reason for deciding that he did not want to see Aleixandre again.<ref name="Cernuda2202">Cernuda: OCP vol 2 Vicente Aleixandre (1950) p 202</ref>

After his return to Madrid from Toulouse in June 1929, he met Aleixandre again: he recounts that it was Aleixandre who re-introduced himself to Cernuda as he himself did not recognise him.  Gradually, over the course of many meetings, Cernuda's habitual reserve and distrust faded.  His friendship with Vicente Aleixandre developed into the closest he had ever had.  They often met in Aleixandre's house, sometimes with Lorca and Altolaguirre there as well.  Aleixandre seems to have had a special gift for friendship, because he also became one of Lorca's closest friends (according to Ian Gibson).<ref name=Gibson199>Gibson p 199</ref> and Cernuda notes specifically his skill as an attentive and sympathetic listener.  The implication is that he was trusted with the intimate confessions of many of his friends.<ref name="Cernuda2204">Cernuda: OCP vol 2 Vicente Aleixandre (1950) p 204</ref> Cernuda also gives a very favourable account of Aleixandre's poetry in ''Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea'', seeing in his work the struggle of a man of intense feeling trapped inside a sick body,<ref name="Cernuda228">Cernuda: OCP vol 1 Vicente Aleixandre p 228</ref> an analogous situation to his own struggle for fulfilment.

However, not even Aleixandre was able to escape from Cernuda's sensitivity about his future reputation.  In the 1950s, he wrote a few essays on his memories of Cernuda, which of course were fixed in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  He describes his friend's apparent detachment from the world and unwillingness to engage.  No attempt was made to see whether that old image still fitted the man who had gone through all the upheaval that Cernuda had experienced while going into exile.  Perhaps more importantly, there was no attempt made to dissociate the poetry written by Cernuda, from Cernuda the man as Aleixandre had known him 20 years earlier.<ref name="Harris A Study11">Harris A Study of the Poetry p11</ref>