Greguerías - Accion Cultural Española

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Apéndice circense
392
apéndice circense
Gómez de la Serna dando una conferencia desde un trapecio, 1923
Fotografía, 15 x 8 cm
Colección Artística de ABC, Madrid
e.1. Ramón
una charla con miliki:
sobre el
del que escribió ramón
por Carlos Pérez
“El clown es el que sostiene el circo y quizás sostiene la vida,
siendo lo que más consuelo nos da el que después de nuestra
muerte ellos continuarán sus payasadas.”
R A M O N G O M E Z D E L A S E R N A, El Circo, 1917
EN diciembre de 1923 se ofreció un homenaje a Ramón Gómez de la Serna en el Gran Circo Americano de Madrid. En aquel acto, bastante singular, colaboraron Valentín Gutiérrez de Miguel –promotor del homenaje–, el dibujante Sancha que hizo caricaturas al público, Juan Pérez Zúñiga que escribió
unas poesías humorísticas para que las leyese el clown Thedy y, por supuesto, el propio Ramón que
leyó su discurso de agradecimiento desde lo alto de un trapecio. Sin duda, se trató de una adhesión
de artistas y público más que merecida ya que, seis años antes, Ramón –que según sus propias palabras se consideraba, ante todo, un cronista del circo– había publicado en Madrid El Circo, editado
por Imprenta Latina con cubierta de Salvador Bartolozzi, un texto considerado, con el paso del tiempo,
como uno de los más importantes y documentados sobre lo que Phileas T. Barnum y James A. Bailey
dieron en calificar como “el mayor espectáculo del mundo”. El libro despertó gran interés y conoció
una segunda edición, publicada por Sempere en Valencia en 1926 –con cubierta de Bon (Román
Bonet) e ilustraciones de Apa (Feliu Elías) y del mismo Ramón–, siendo también traducido al francés, y editado en París, en 1927, por Simón Kra que llegó a realizar cinco reimpresiones de la obra.
Como se ha mencionado, en aquel “número” especial desarrollado en la pista del Gran Circo Americano, tuvo una participación muy activa Thedy (Teodoro Aragón Foureaux), uno de los miembros,
junto con sus hermanos Pompoff (Jose María) y Emig (Emilio), del célebre trio de clowns españoles que rivalizó, en aquella época, con los Hermanos Fratellini, la no menos famosa troupe cómica
que, con la eficaz ayuda de las notas de una sierra musical y los disparos de una pistola detonadora,
asombró en todas las partes del mundo, tal como se decía en los circos, a “grandes y pequeños”.
Emilio Aragón, Miliki, hijo de Emig y sobrino de Pompoff y de Thedy, es el representante de la
tercera generación de una de las grandes familias del circo y, como sus antecesores, ha hecho de
todo en ese espectáculo. Porque los artistas de la carpa, en su aprendizaje, se vieron obligados a
hacer de todo –“de todo menos vender gaseosas”, se vieron forzados a puntualizar los Fratellini en
su prólogo a la edición francesa del libro de Ramón–. Por ese motivo nos pareció que, para el apéndice circense de la exposición, era más que oportuno entrevistar a Miliki. En su compañía –y la de
Mario Castiel, su representante–, repasamos muchas instantáneas tomadas durante distintas actuaciones de los miembros de la familia y asimismo programas y anuncios publicitarios, incluyendo uno,
bastante curioso, publicado en Francia, en el que se utilizó una gira de Pompoff, Thedy y Emig para
una charla con miliki
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e.2. Buen
Humor, nº 105, 2 de diceimbre de 1923
proclamar las excelencias del automóvil Hispano-Suiza. Se podría decir que comprobamos cómo el
automóvil –ese vehículo que tanto entusiasmaba al futurista Marinetti– necesitó, en bastantes ocasiones, el apoyo del humor.
–Ramón siempre tuvo en gran consideración al trío Pompoff-Thedy-Emig; tal vez por eso, cuando
para la segunda edición de El Circo añadió un capítulo dedicado a los números históricos, dijo de
ellos: “payasos de gran personalidad, esclarecedores del buen humor, improvisadores de bromas,
oradores espontáneos, los clowns de Granada, en una palabra”.
–Presiento que Ramón intuía lo que llegarían a ser Pompoff, Thedy y Emig. Este genial trío triunfó
en toda Europa, Hispanoamérica y América del Norte. Ellos fueron la mejor representación del auténtico clown español. Su creatividad y personalidad les hizo inolvidables. Mi gran amigo José Mario
Armero los citaba como la aristocracia del circo. Crearon una escuela que aún perdura.
–Según Julio Gómez de la Serna, su hermano Ramón se empecinó en llevar el puro humorismo
del circo a la vida y a la literatura, por lo que en su obra se detecta un afán por “asesinar al ridículo,
de volver a la alegría primigenia del mundo, de involucrar la seriedad solemne y engolada, que constituyen la misión trascendental del clown, del excéntrico”.
–Lo que quería Ramón es que fuésemos capaces de reírnos de nosotros mismos. Se trataba de
una utopía en una España donde los complejos se imponían y las diferencias marcaban la sociedad.
–En los primeros años del siglo XX los artistas de circo –también los empresarios, sucesores del
mítico Barnum, como Bailey, Shumann o los Ringling– eran profesionales muy conocidos, tan respetados y laureados como las grandes figuras del teatro y del cine, entonces balbuceante. Ramón, en
un artículo sobre los carteles de circo, escribió que en el pasillo de su casa tenía colgado uno que
era “el retrato de un hombre lleno de medallas como no hubo ningún Napoleón”.
–Los tres espectáculos más importantes de aquella época, en toda Europa, eran el circo, la danza
y la ópera. Por esta razón, sus protagonistas, empresarios y artistas, eran las primeras figuras del
momento. Por ejemplo, un trapecista francés de nombre Leotard, puso de moda unas medias que
llegaban a la cintura, que fueron denominadas “leotardos”. Esa especie de medias las usaron y las
usan aún todas las mujeres del mundo. Y siguen llamándose así.
–Las imágenes de los carteles transmitieron todo el exotismo y la magia del circo. Desde Jules
Chéret y Toulouse-Lautrec, en las últimas décadas del XIX, hasta los años cincuenta del pasado siglo,
se desarrolló, en gran medida por dibujantes anónimos, una escuela del cartel que llegó a influir tanto
a los artistas modernos como a la publicidad comercial.
–En efecto, la influencia de los carteles de circo ha llegado hasta nuestros días. Hoy, las compañías
discográficas usan la cartelería callejera al estilo de los circos. España tuvo geniales impresores y dibujantes de carteles de circo como Luchi y Ardavín. En Valencia hubo excelentes litografías y, también allí,
se confeccionaban las carpas para el espectáculo por un conocido fabricante de velas para barcos que,
cuando ese tipo de navegación decayó, supo orientar su empresa hacia otras direcciones.
–Las “actuaciones” de Ramón derivaron del circo, ya fuera la lectura de uno de sus textos en el
Cirque d’Hiver de París, a lomos de un elefante, o la conferencia que impartió sobre El caballero de
la mano en el pecho, en la que consiguió que éste subiera y bajara la mano mediante un sencillo mecanismo. Por lo visto, el humorismo de Ramón siempre propició el encuentro del arte y la literatura.
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–Así lo escuché, en varias ocasiones, en conversaciones familiares. Creo que Ramón trataba de
acercar el arte a la literatura a través del humor más instintivo, expresivo y espontáneo. El de los grandes clowns del circo.
–Cuando apareció la edición francesa de El Circo, el escritor y filósofo alemán Walter Benjamin
escribió una crítica, en la que subrayó que con textos como el de Ramón se comenzaba a investigar
el circo, el gran alcance artístico del “espectáculo más barato capaz de reunir a todo tipo de público”.
En efecto, la temática del circo interesó a la mayoría de escritores y artistas de vanguardia. Se puede
decir que la mayoría de ellos intentó traducir en sus obras el color, el movimiento, la joie de vivre,
el ambiente fascinante del espectáculo. A partir del final de la segunda contienda mundial se insistió fundamentalmente en la anécdota, en un romanticismo decadente, en una “tragedia” del circo
que no se sabe muy bien si se trata tan sólo de un tópico.
–A finales del siglo xıx y los primeros cuarenta años del xx, la influencia del espectáculo circense
no sólo cautivó a escritores, pintores y escultores relevantes. También, y en razón de lo ecuestre,
interesó sobremanera a las casas reales europeas, hasta el punto de celebrarse funciones benéficas
donde miembros de esas familias actuaban a caballo. En cuanto a lo de la “tragedia”, si mal no recuerdo,
la lágrima al rostro del clown se la puso Dickens.
–El circo, en su época de esplendor, tuvo un papel importante como difusor de otras culturas. Así,
por ejemplo, el público se familiarizó con la música popular de otros países, con los ritmos del ragtime
y el charlestón importados de Norteamérica. Creo que no se puede imaginar un circo sin música que,
para Ramón, era “violenta, ferviente, torpe, arrostrada y admirable”.
–La música de circo fue arrolladora. Las grandes marchas y temas circenses llegan a nuestros días.
En aquellos años, las orquestas que acompañaban el espectáculo en los circos estables eran casi
sinfónicas. Yo tuve el privilegio de actuar en el Coliseo Balear de Mallorca y en el Coliseo dos Recreios
de Lisboa con una orquesta de cuarenta músicos. Recientemente, el Circo del Arte que creamos en
esta familia, tenía una orquesta en vivo de dieciséis intérpretes, y la música era original. El Cirque du
Soleil, actualmente, presenta su espectáculo con una música en directo maravillosa.
–Es evidente que, de 1900 a 1930, los números de circo se presentaban internacionalmente sin
marcadas diferencias. Por ejemplo, Emig, su padre, actuaba de botones a la manera de los minstrels
americanos, embadurnado de negro. Fue un momento en el que el vodevil, las barracas de feria –los
“saldos de circo” que decía Ramón– y los saltimbanquis que circulaban por pueblos y ciudades tenían
muchos puntos en común con el circo.
–Es cierto que, en algunas ocasiones, por razones comerciales, todo se mezclaba. Así lo que se
conocía como varietés, algo muy directamente relacionado con la revista, llegó a combinarse con
números de circo. Por otro lado, hubo artistas, como Grock que era un payaso mudo, que conectaban mejor con el público desde el escenario de un teatro que desde la pista de un circo. A Charlie
Rivel, en los inicios de su segunda etapa artística –la primera la dedicó a hacer imitaciones de Charlot–, le pasó algo similar. Mi padre –cuyo papel de botones procedió de Cuba– trajo a Josephine Baker
a los escenarios españoles, mientras mi tío Thedy hacía unas parodias muy divertidas de la famosa
cantante y bailarina en la pista del circo. Efectivamente todo se mezcló y, desde la crisis del circo y
el auge de la televisión, en un mismo espectáculo coincidían actuaciones circenses con otras de
cantantes, bailarines... El prestigioso programa televisivo de Ed Sullivan –en el que actué con mis
hermanos– siempre incluyó números de circo. Nosotros llevamos el circo a la televisión. Es curioso,
396
carlos pérez
pero las atracciones más aplaudidas en esa clase de espectáculo son las de circo, sobre todo los
malabaristas o los equilibristas.
–Ramón siempre admiró las películas mudas protagonizadas por Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry
Langdon y Charles Chaplin. Charlot, el personaje interpretado por éste último, le interesó en especial
y hasta le dedicó una ópera que nunca se llegó a estrenar. Todos aquellos artistas procedían del circo
y su “humorismo” era próximo al de Ramón y al de los clowns que continuaban con su trabajo en la
pista. Con el tiempo, esa manera de hacer reír, basada en el gag y en el absurdo de lo cotidiano se fue
perdiendo. Se puede decir que –no sólo en el circo, sino también en el cine con la desaparición de artistas como W. C. Fields o Jimmy Durante– una plaga de imitadores se impuso a la creación.
–De todos los mencionados, tuve el placer de compartir escenario durante varios meses con Buster
Keaton. También viví unas horas inolvidables con Jimmy Durante. Todos ellos estuvieron influenciados por el humor del circo, y todos amaron el inmortal espectáculo. Pienso que el declive se produce
más que por la imitación, por la falta de expresionismo al llegar los charlistas que nos traen la Stand
Up Comedy.
–Bueno, yo me refería concretamente a esos parodistas que, desde hace unos años, son una auténtica legión y, más que artistas, parecen aficionados.
–Es verdad, pero como he comentado, en su mayor parte, como continuadores del charlismo, se
basan en la palabra. Creo que la expresión, el gesto, se ha perdido.
–Buster Keaton escribe en sus memorias que, en lugar de una educación formal, recibió la mejor
educación extra-escolar: su madre le enseñó a leer, escribir y sumar; Bill Bojangles Robinson le inició
en el claqué; Herb Williams le dio clases de piano y Houdini le descubrió el secreto de algunos juegos
de manos. Esta educación heterodoxa fue, muchas veces, más útil que la impartida en escuelas y
colegios prestigiosos.
–De una manera simpática, en el circo la educación se dio en denominar “el bachillerato ambulante”.
Es decir, el saber que se adquiere progresivamente al entrar en contacto con otros pueblos y otras culturas, combinado con los ensayos en la pista que determinan el futuro del artista. Un caso excepcional
fue mi padre, el único de sus quince hermanos que estudió el bachiller –interno en un colegio de Gante–
y, hasta que acabó, no se incorporó al espectáculo. Todos los miembros de la familia hablaban varios
idiomas –no sé si sabían escribirlos– y tenían esa amplia cultura que se adquiere viajando. De todas
formas, pienso que los extremos no son buenos y que la educación normal es necesaria. Para llegar a
ser genial en algo no se pueden dejar de lado otros conocimientos. De todo esto hablé mucho con Pau
Casals, al que su madre le impuso, desde muy pequeño, el aprendizaje del violoncelo.
–Tal vez por eso, los números de circo –en un ambiente sincero y diáfano en palabras de Ramón–
presentaban una estructura pedagógica inusual, en la que tenían cabida nociones heterodoxas de
Geografía, Anatomía o Física y también, lo más importante, una manera distinta de ver el mundo,
alejada de reiterados e inútiles enfrentamientos. Al respecto, Ramón, en su homenaje, declaró: “La
soñada paz universal se firmará en un gran circo, una de esas noches, en que sobre la alta cucaña
humana se despliegan todas las banderas en verdadera fraternidad”.
–En el circo han convivido todas las religiones, todas las razas y todas las maneras de pensar. La
tolerancia es una característica de la vida del circo. Así, se respetaba tanto el Ramadán que observaban los musulmanes como las ideas sociales que profesaba cada cual. Los artistas del circo esta-
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ban convencidos de que el arte podía unir a los hombres y modificar positivamente las relaciones
humanas.
–En el epílogo de El Circo, Ramón da una larga lista de artistas, únicos e inigualables –si empleamos adjetivos muy circenses– como, por citar unos pocos, La Bella López, Stanley, Nieves Alonso,
Búfalo Maciste, Fabra, el Trío Baldó, Agustín y Hartley, el trío Pompoff-Thedy-Emig, Béby, Seiffert,
los Perezoff o The Great Carmo. También escribe sobre los empresarios William Parish y Tomás Price.
Parece ser que, efectivamente, eran únicos e inigualables y, después de ellos, todo fue muy diferente.
–Esos nombres vivieron y representaron “la gran época del circo”. Conocí a varias de las familias
mencionadas. William Parish contrajo matrimonio con la hija adoptiva de Tomás Price. Él construyó,
en la Plaza del Rey de Madrid, el circo al que puso el nombre de Price en recuerdo de su suegro.
–En el circo abundaban las familias y las troupes de hermanos. Puede servir de ejemplo el caso
de Willy Frediani, comentado por Sebastià Gasch en su libro El circo y sus figuras, que se casó con
la écuyère Bugny de Brailly y un hijo de ambos, Nani, contrajo matrimonio con la alambrista Virginia Aragón. A su fallecimiento, Willy Frediani padre de nueve hijos –que se habían instalado en Tánger,
en Glasgow y en diferentes puntos de Italia–, según señalaba el escritor catalán, dejó veintidós nietos
que, sin duda, serían “artistas circenses en su día”. Esas familias de composición tan internacional
aseguraban la continuación del espectáculo.
–El espectáculo de circo siempre se nutrió de familias que constituyeron a su vez dinastías. Los
apellidos ilustres son conocidos mundialmente dentro del ámbito circense. En el libro de Sebastià
Gasch hay un dato erróneo: Nani Frediani no se casó con mi tía Virginia Aragón, lo hizo con Mercedes Guerra Aragón, hija de Virginia. La familia Frediani terminó instalándose en España. Casi todos
los nietos de Willy fueron grandes artistas. Uno de ellos, Xandro, interpreta un personaje en la actual
serie de televisión que he creado, titulada Trilocos.
–Precisamente ese cosmopolitismo de muchas familias hacía posible que durante una temporada
un artista trabajara de malabarista húngaro y, en la siguiente, de equilibrista ruso. Al respecto, Ramón
habla de los Perezoff : “unos Pérez de artística tradición cómica, que parecen rusos en las pistas del
mundo. Aquí su apellido cuenta con una simpatía patriótica, pues Madrid es la patria de esos falsos
moscovitas”. Y del Trío Baldó escribe: “trío árabe, que no es árabe sino por aquello que en secreto
decía un político español que lo que pasó fue que echamos a los cristianos y nos quedamos los árabes”.
–Normalmente, cada apellido se dedicaba a una especialidad, aunque algunos miembros de las familias probasen otras artes. Los Knie eran, y son, domadores. Los Loyal, écuyères y caballistas a volteo.
Los Perezoff, malabaristas. Los Aragón, clowns, como los Fratellini y los valencianos hermanos Díaz.
–Llegó un momento en que los circos estables cerraron y los que viajaban ya no acudieron a sus citas
tradicionales. El espectáculo, tal como se había concebido desde sus orígenes, entró en decadencia.
El publicó perdió así el contacto con ese circo eterno, glorioso e inefable sobre el que escribió Ramón.
–Las familias Aragón, Feijóo, Corzana, Romero, Cortés, Álvarez, Parish, Sánchez Rexach, y otras,
amaban profundamente el circo y lo que éste representaba. Lo que el circo les producía lo invertían
de nuevo en el circo. Sin generalizar, a partir de los años cuarenta del pasado siglo surgieron una serie
de empresarios especuladores, más bien feriantes, que hicieron del circo un sacaperras y llevaron tan
noble espectáculo a los tristes niveles de pobreza en que se encuentra hoy en día. Sobre todo su
imagen en España.
398
carlos pérez
e.3. Folleto
de mano para el
homenaje a Ramón Gómez
de la Serna en el Circo
Americano de Madrid, 1923
399
400
apéndice circense
Colección Feijóo, Madrid
Circo Americano de Madrid. Sánchez, Rexach, Perezoff, s/f
e.4. Mena
apéndice circense
401
e.5. Anónimo
Le capitaine Luci, s/f
Litografía sobre papel, 80 x 115 cm
Colección José Mario Armero, Madrid
402
apéndice circense
e.6. Anónimo
The Fak-hongs, s/f
Lith Adoph Friedländer, Hamburgo
apéndice circense
403
404
apéndice circense
1e.7.
Favinavot
Cirque Canadien, s/f
1e.8. Anónimo
British Circus Music-hall Impérator. Le fakir Shah
Rabey et son sujet “Astrale”. La femme aérienne !!, s/f
Affiches Louis Galice, París
1e.9. Anónimo
Tous les secrets de l’au delà du spiritisme du magnètisme, s/f
Studio de Magie, París
e.10. Anónimo
The Jacquelyns, s/f
Gráficas Vior, Barcelona
apéndice circense
405
e.11. Värs,
B.
Zoli, s/f
Pöhmj, Budapest
406
apéndice circense
e.12. Anónimo
Les 4 Sorciers Chinois Cirque Music-Hall Palmarium, s/f
Atelier Florit, Vitry-sur Seine
apéndice circense
407
e.13. Anónimo
L’enfer au British Circus Music-hall Impérator, s/f
408
apéndice circense
e.14. F.
Florit
La tête vivante sans corps. Énigme scientifique. Cirque Ancillotti, s/f
Imp. Jombart Fres. Lille-Asnières
apéndice circense
409
e.15. Anónimo
Semona. La lucha con el león, s/f
Litografía, 133 x 94 cm
Lith Adolph Friedländer, Hamburgo
410
apéndice circense
e.16. Anónimo
Mephistophel. Air Atraction Origuiary, 1943
Tipolito Central, Porto
apéndice circense
411
e.17.
Anónimo
Roca, s/f
Stafford & Co., Londres
412
apéndice circense
e.18. Anónimo
Folies Bergère. L’homme-obus, s/f
Imp. Emilie Levy, París
apéndice circense
413
e.19. Anónimo
Prof. Antonio’s. Midgets-Novelty. Colibris-Company, s/f
Tip. Lit. Monterfaro, Milán
414
apéndice circense
e.20. Vinfer
Ramper, s/f
Lit. Mauricio Fernández
apéndice circense
415
e.21. J.
Roichard
Cirque d’Hiver. Robert-Macaire, s/f
Affiches V. Palyart & C ie., París
Colección Francisco Baena, Barcelona
416
apéndice circense
˘ utta
e.22. V. C
4 Bronetts, ca. 1925
Litogr. K. Kr̆íz̆, Praga
Museum of Decorative Arts, Praga
apéndice circense
417
e.23. Anónimo
Cirkus King. Domteur lions, ca. 1920
418
apéndice circense
e.24. Anónimo
Samek, ca. 1920
apéndice circense
419
e.25. Anónimo
Rellos, s/f
420
apéndice circense
e.26. Anónimo
Rellos, s/f
apéndice circense
421
e.27.
Anónimo
Rellos, s/f
422
apéndice circense
e.28. Anónimo
S. W. Harvard Comp. Wild West Show, s/f
apéndice circense
423
e.29. Anónimo
La Revolución Francesa
“La Guillotina”, s/f
Colección Manuel Ferrando, Alicante
424
apéndice circense
apéndice circense
425
e.30. Anónimo
The Great Chang and Fak-Hong’s. The Noe Ark, ca. 1930
Lit. Hija E. Mirabet, Valencia
Biblioteca Valenciana
426
apéndice circense
e.31. Anónimo
Chang and Fak-Hong’s. A night in Tokio, s/f
apéndice circense
427
e.32. Anónimo
Chang and Fak-Hong’s. Hara-kiri, ca. 1930
428
apéndice circense
e.33. Anónimo
The Great Chang presents Fak-Hong’s. Japanesse Review, ca. 1930
apéndice circense
429
e.34. Anónimo
The Great Chang and Fak-Hong’s. Oriental Review, ca. 1930
430
apéndice circense
e.35. Anónimo
The Fak-Hong’s.
Numero d’illusion: le plus grand du monde, s/f
Imp. Lit. E. Mirabet, Valencia
apéndice circense
431
e.36. Marzal
Payaso, loros y señora, s/f
Prueba de imprenta; litografía sobre papel, 48’5 x 33’5 cm
Organización Salvador Hervás; Lit. Mirabet, Valencia
432
apéndice circense
e.37.
J.R. Sevilla
Cortés and Mari. Manipulador, ilusionistas. Mahomeda, 1923
Colección Javier Conde Catena
e.38. Anónimo
Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth, 1917
apéndice circense
433
e.39. Anónimo
Figuier le Cirque sans Bluff, 1928
434
apéndice circense
e.40. Arreis
Ackohr Autómatas, s/f
Litografía sobre papel, 126’5 x 96 cm
Imp. Lit. E. Mirabet, Valencia
apéndice circense
435
e.41. Ramón
436
e.42. Anónimo
Circo Feijoo ¡El circo de los circos!, s/f
Baron Franskoko’s. L’As des As, s/f
Lit. Gráficas Valencia
apéndice circense
apéndice circense
437
e.43. Anónimo
Les merveilleux lions marins. Attraction présentée par le capitain Navarro, s/f
Imp. Lit. J. Ortega, Valencia
438
apéndice circense
e.44. Anónimo
Anuncios para Houdini, Le Maître du Mystère,
1923
Litografía sobre papel, 25’5 x 26 cm cada uno
Colección particular, Valencia
apéndice circense
439
Gutiérrez, n.º 132, 14 de diciembre de 1929
cronología
ramón gómez de la serna:
intento de cronología
por Juan Manuel Bonet
1888
Nace en Madrid, el 3 de julio, en la calle de las Rejas, 5, hoy de Guillermo Rolland, 7, junto al Senado.
Es bautizado en la parroquia de San Martín. Su padre, el abogado Javier Gómez de la Serna, por aquel
entonces alto funcionario del Ministerio de Ultramar, pertenece a una familia de juristas y políticos liberales,
con casa solariega en Castilruiz, provincia de Soria. Su madre, Josefa Puig Coronado, es sobrina de la poetisa
romántica extremeña Carolina Coronado. Se habían casado durante el otoño de 1887.
1890
1896
La familia Gómez de la Serna se traslada a la calle Mayor, 79.
La familia Gomez de la Serna se traslada a la Corredera Baja de San Pablo, 17. Asiste junto con su
hermano José al Colegio del Niño Jesús, en la misma calle. Entre sus condiscípulos mencionará
en Automoribundia a Fernando y Francisco Calleja.
1898
Tras la pérdida de Cuba y Filipinas, Javier Gómez de la Serna es despedido del Ministerio de Ultramar, trasladándose con su familia al pueblo palentino de Frechilla, donde ha sido nombrado registra-
dor de la propiedad. Ramón y su hermano José entran internos en el colegio escolapio de San Isidoro, de Palencia,
donde son “tan desgraciados y huérfanos como se es en un colego interno”, y donde él es compañero de curso
del futuro poeta –“el noveno poeta español”, como lo llamará– y futuro pombiano Francisco Vighi.
1900
Tras salir elegido el padre diputado por Hinojosa del Duque (Córdoba), y tras pedir la excedencia
como registrador, la familia Gómez de la Serna regresa a Madrid, instalándose en el número 35-37 de
la calle de Fuencarral. Junto con su hermano José, prosigue sus estudios, primero en los Escolapios de San
Antón, y luego en el Instituto del Cardenal Cisneros, donde es condiscípulo de Ricardo Baeza.
1902
Lanza El Postal, una “revista defensora de derechos estudiantiles” auto-ilustrada, tirada a multicopista en 25 ejemplares, en la que colabora Ramos de Castro: “el periódico de gelatina, difícil, desga-
rrador, con todos los dolores de una nueva dentición”.
1903
La familia Gómez de la Serna se traslada a la calle de la Puebla, donde él residirá hasta 1918, y donde
comienza a construir su primer despacho literario: “preparo mi primer despacho con cosas del Rastro,
con reproducciones en yeso y con una chimenea de mármol en que meto leña por mi cuenta”. Como premio
por haber terminado el Bachillerato, viaja por vez primera a París. Inicia sus estudios en la Facultad de Derecho, donde es condiscípulo de Ricardo Baeza y de Francisco Martínez Corbalán.
1904
Comienza a frecuentar el Ateneo de Madrid. Su tio segundo Andrés García de la Barga y Gómez de la
Serna, que en el futuro será conocido como “Corpus Barga”, publica Cantares, su primer libro. Ese
año o el siguiente, descubre en el Círculo de Bellas Artes la pintura de José Gutiérrez Solana.
443
1905
Colabora en el diario republicano radical La Región Extremeña, en El Adelantado de Segovia y
en otros diarios regionales. Carolina Coronado escribe a su hermano Alejandro, arremetiendo contra
los “disparates impresos” del sobrino. Publica su primer libro, Entrando en fuego , subtitulado “Santas
inquietudes de un colegial”, y en el que anuncia la publicación de Plus Ultra , una revista que jamás vería
la luz.
1906
1908
Fallece su madre.
Publica Morbideces, con motivo de cuya aparición se le tributa, en la Bombilla, junto al Manzanares, un banquete presidido por Manuel Ciges Aparicio, y al que asisten, entre otros, Julio Antonio y
Eugenio Noel, uno de sus primeros amigos literarios. Termina sus estudios de Derecho en Oviedo, donde es
condiscípulo de Guillermo Castañón y Eduardo M. Torner, entre otros, y donde es novio de María Jove. Su padre
funda Prometeo, revista que en la práctica terminará dirigiendo él, y en la que publicará a Aloysius Bertrand,
Colette, Paul Fort, Remy de Gourmont, Francis Jammes, Lautréamont, Jean Lorrain, Maurice Maeterlinck, Camille Mauclair, Rachilde, Georges Rodenbach, Saint-Pol Roux, Marcel Schwob, Laurent Tailhade y otros “raros”
franceses y belgas, a Gabriele d’Annunzio y Giovanni Papini, a Thomas de Quincey, G.B. Shaw, Swinburne,
Arthur Symons, Walt Whitman y Oscar Wilde, al portugués Eugénio de Castro, al brasileño Olavo Bilac, así como
a Manuel Abril, Ricardo Baeza, Ramón de Basterra, Joaquín Belda, Carmen de Burgos, Rafael Cansinos-Asséns,
Emilio Carrere, Juan Díaz-Caneja, Enrique Díez-Canedo, Fernando Fortún, José Francés, Federico García
Sanchiz, José García Vela, Andrés González Blanco, Ramón Goy de Silva, Nicasio Hernández Luquero, Antonio
de Hoyos y Vinent, Prudencio Iglesias Hermida, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Silverio Lanza, Rafael Lasso de la Vega,
Rafael Leyda, Gabriel Miró, Tomás Morales, Gonzalo Morenas de Tejada, Eugenio Noel, José Ortiz de Pinedo,
Alonso Quesada, Emiliano Ramírez Ángel, Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Luis Ruiz Contreras, Pedro Salinas, José Sánchez
Rojas, Rafael Urbano, Ángel Vegue y Goldoni y Francisco Villaespesa, entre otros.
1909
Inicia una relación sentimental, que durará muchos años, con la escritora Carmen de Burgos, “Colombine”, a la que ha conocido el año anterior. Publica en Prometeo su traducción del “Manifiesto futu-
rista” de F.T. Marinetti, aparecido poco antes en el diario Le Figaro de París, y sus dramas La utopía y Beatriz.
Como recién elegido secretario de la Sección de Literatura del Ateneo de Madrid, lee y publica luego en Prome-
teo una memoria en torno a El concepto de la nueva literatura. Durante esa sesión ateneística, conoce
a Silverio Lanza, al que visitará frecuentemente en su casa de Getafe. Organiza en el Café de Fornos, el 24 de
marzo, y con invitación dibujada por Julio Antonio, un banquete a Mariano José de Larra: “Larra está con
nosotros”. Inicio de una estancia en París, en el Hotel de Suez, como secretario de la Junta de Pensiones, que
se prolongará hasta 1911, entrecortada por viajes a Gran Bretaña –pasa las Navidades de ese año en Londres,
“un Londres pacífico, crédulo, con una niebla color ámbar, iluminada con lámparas de alabastro amarillo en
que ardía luz de sol”, en compañía de Carmen de Burgos, que le ha ido a visitar a la capital francesa–, Italia y
Suiza. En París ve a Pío Baroja, a Manuel Ciges Aparicio y a Corpus Barga, entre otros, y conoce –“hacia el 1912”,
dirá años después– a Remy de Gourmont.
1910
Publica El libro mudo –con epílogos de Silverio Lanza y Juan Ramón Jiménez– y Sur del re-
nacimiento escultórico español , texto este último inspirado en el universo plástico de Julio
Antonio. Inicia sus “Diálogos triviales”, celebrados en el Café de Sevilla, y publicados luego en la revista, en
la que por otra parte aparecen su drama El laberinto , su pantomima La bailarina , y sus dos únicos
poemas publicados, “Post-scriptum” –que se inicia con este verso: “También hago poesías en secreto”– y
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juan manuel bonet
“Nieve tardía”, este último dedicado a Juan Ramón Jiménez. Siempre en Prometeo , aparece la “Proclama
futurista a los españoles” escrita para la ocasión por Marinetti, precedida de un preliminar suyo. Es nombrado
vice-presidente del Teatro de Ensayo. Según dirá en Ismos, descubre ese año la pintura cubista, en el Salon
des Indépendants de París, visitado “por casualidad”: “desde entonces entré en el caos febriciente de la pintura
moderna y su interés”.
1911
Publica Ex-Votos. Aparece en Prometeo su comedia Los sonámbulos. Por influencia paterna,
es nombrado oficial técnico de la Fiscalía del Tribunal Supremo, cargo que mantendrá hasta los años
de la dictadura de Primo de Rivera.
1912
Gracias a Tomás Borrás, inicia su colaboración en un nuevo diario madrileño, La Tribuna, donde
publica sus primeras greguerías. Banquete a la Primavera en la Bombilla. Desaparece, tras 38 núme-
ros, Prometeo, donde publica sus dramas El teatro en soledad y El lunático. Fallece Silverio Lanza.
Empieza a frecuentar el Café y Botillería de Pombo de la calle de Carretas.
1913
Publica Tapices, con cubierta de Salvador Bartolozzi, y su primera novela corta, El ruso, con ilustraciones del mismo pintor. Prologa Las piedras de Venecia de John Ruskin, con un ensayo titulado
“Ruskin el apasionado”.
1914
1915
Publica El Rastro, con cubierta de Salvador Bartolozzi, uno de sus libros fundamentales, y al que al
año siguiente Diego Rivera dedicará un bodegón, y su novela corta El doctor inverosímil.
Funda la tertulia sabatina de Pombo; los demás fundadores son, según consta en la “Primera proclama
de Pombo”, Manuel Abril, Luis Bagaría, Salvador Bartolozzi, José Bergamín, su hermano el arquitecto
Rafael Bergamín –que dibuja su emblema–, Tomás Borrás, José Cabrero, Rafael Calleja, Rafael Cansinos-Asséns,
el camarero Pepe Cerezo, José Gutiérrez Solana, Gustavo de Maeztu, Diego Rivera y Rafael Romero Calvet, “el
otro Durero”. Prologa el catálogo de la exposición de Los pintores íntegros, cuyos participantes son el caricaturista Luis Bagaría, los pintores María Blanchard –“muchacha brujesca y genial”– y Diego Rivera, y un
escultor, Agustín “El Choco”, ayudante de Julio Antonio. Su retrato cubista por Rivera se incorpora, con gran
escándalo, al escaparate de la muestra. Frecuenta a Marie Laurencin y a la modista Nicole Groult, y a Jacques
Lipchitz, con el que comparte la pasión por las máscaras africanas. Pronuncia, en Bilbao, su conferencia en
torno al humorismo. Primer viaje a Portugal: un descubrimiento del que dará maravillada cuenta en sus cartas
desde allá a los pombianos: “En Lisboa, en la que se vuelve a sentir el desayuno primero del mundo, me siento
por fin feliz, y encuentro en su suelo algo de tierra de promisión”. Y también: “Portugal es una ventana hacia
un sitio con más luz, hacia un más allá más pletórico”.
1916
Prologa Confidencias de artistas de Carmen de Burgos, de cuyo libro Peregrinaciones escribe el
epílogo. Pasa por Pombo el poeta chileno Vicente Huidobro, que visita Madrid por vez primera, camino
de París. Viaje a Suiza.
1917
Publica Greguerías –con cubierta en damero, a partir del papel de fumar “Jean”–, Senos y El circo.
Artículos sobre su obra de Azorín y José María Salaverría, ambos en ABC. Viaje a París, y proyecto de
álbum litográfico París 1917 , para el que realizan originales Angelina Beloff, Juan Gris, Lipchitz, Marevna,
Picasso, Diego Rivera y el también mexicano Ángel Zárraga, a varios de los cuales acaba de conocer. Conoce
además a Guillaume Apollinaire, a Ilya Ehrenburg, a Modigliani y al chileno Manuel Ortiz de Zárate. Estancia
ramón gómez de la serna: un intento de cronología
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en Italia, donde asiste –en Florencia– a una fiesta teatral futurista. Banquete pombiano a Picasso, presente en
Madrid con motivo de la representación por los Ballets Russes de Parade de Erik Satie, con sus decorados y
figurines, en el Teatro Real.
1918
Publica Pombo –el primero de sus dos libros sobre el café, que lleva una negra cubierta de Romero
Calvet, y al final del cual incluye sus cartas de París, de Italia y de Lisboa a los pombianos–, Senos y
Muestrario. Ordena y prologa una antología de Páginas escogidas e inéditas de Silverio Lanza. Prologa El
retrato de Dorian Gray de Oscar Wilde. Banquete pombiano a Tomás Borrás, Conrado del Campo y Ángel
Barrios, por el estreno de El Avapiés. Doble banquete ramoniano por sus libros, en Pombo un día, y al día
siguiente, y en versión económica, en El Púlpito. Conoce, en Pombo, a Valéry Larbaud, entonces residente en
Alicante, y que con el tiempo se convertiría en su principal valedor en Francia. Artículo sobre él de Alfonso
Reyes en Hispania de París. Se traslada a la calle de María de Molina, 44.
1919
Publica Greguerías selectas –con prólogo de Rafael Calleja– y El Paseo del Prado. Prologa
Las hijas del fuego de Gérard de Nerval, Muñecas de Théodore de Banville, Nuevos cuentos crue-
les y La Eva futura de Villiers de l’Isle Adam y El crimen de Lord Arturo Savile de Oscar Wilde. Nace el ultraísmo, movimiento apadrinado desde el Café Colonial por su antiguo amigo y ya rival Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, y
liderado por el también pombiano Guillermo de Torre, y con el que mantendrá relaciones no exentas de problemas –“para mí llegaban muy tarde las radiografías y los aeroplanos líricos”, dirá en Automoribundia–, pese
a lo cual colaborará en varias de sus revistas, incluida Ultra de Madrid. Valéry Larbaud publica un artículo sobre
él en la revista dadaísta Littérature, acompañando una selección de sus greguerías. Escribe un texto sobre
Francisco Iturrino para un libro colectivo sobre el arte vasco. Fallece Julio Antonio; Ramón escribe su necrología: “lo dejamos allí, en aquel campo que era un barrizal, como tirado sobre la tierra”.
1920
Publica Libro nuevo. Escribe el epílogo de Fígaro, el libro de Carmen de Burgos sobre Mariano
José de Larra; el texto se publica aparte, como El Paseo del Prado. Escribe el epílogo de un volu-
men de Prosa escogida de Charles Baudelaire, y prologa El amor imposible de Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Los
cantos de Maldoror de Lautréamont y Una noche en el Luxemburgo de Remy de Gourmont. Banquete en
honor de todos los pombianos. Tras haber sido expuesto en el Salón de Otoño, el 17 de diciembre queda instalado en la tertulia de Pombo, el cuadro magistral –hoy propiedad del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofía– que le dedica José Gutiérrez Solana, en el que, junto a Ramón y al pintor, figuran Manuel Abril, Mauricio Bacarisse, Salvador Bartolozzi, José Bergamín, Tomás Borrás, José Cabrero y el venezolano Pedro-Emilio
Coll. Aparición en varios números de España del “Poema truncado de Madrid” de Alonso Quesada, en el que
Ramón aparece oficiando en Pombo. Colabora en la revista ultraísta Reflector.
1921
Publica Disparates, Toda la historia de la Puerta del Sol y otras muchas cosas –en
realidad una recopilación de artículos aparecidos en el diario La Tribuna a lo largo del año ante-
rior–, sus novelas La viuda blanca y negra –“escrita en el verano madrileño con la obsesión del crimen,
los celos y el aire trasnochador y verbenero”– y El doctor inverosímil, y sus novelas cortas El miedo al
mar, La tormenta y Leopoldo y Teresa. Banquete pombiano a José Gutiérrez Solana con motivo de la
aparición de La España negra. Es uno de los oradores del banquete a Francisco Grandmontagne, celebrado
en la Posada del Segoviano. Es uno de los escritores españoles entrevistados por el peruano Alberto Guillén en
La linterna de Diógenes. Figura en el “Directorio de vanguardia” de Actual, la revista mural de Manuel Maples
Arce que marca el inicio del estridentismo mexicano. Artículo sobre él de Alfonso Reyes en México Moderno.
Cansinos-Asséns incluye en su novela en clave El Movimiento V.P. un personaje inspirado en él.
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juan manuel bonet
1922
Fallece su padre. Publica Variaciones , sus novelas El gran hotel y El incongruente , y sus
novelas cortas La gangosa, El olor de las mimosas y La hija del verano. Se instala en el
torreón de la calle Velázquez. Banquetes pombianos a José Ortega y Gasset, a Enrique Díez-Canedo, y a Don
Nadie, durante el cual se lee una carta de Unamuno. Asiste al Concurso de Cante Jondo de Granada, organizado por Manuel de Falla y Federico García Lorca. Colabora en el número de la revista Intentions de París en
homenaje a Valéry Larbaud. Yvan Goll lo incluye en su antología internacional Les Cinq continents. Publica
en España un artículo sobre el Monumento a la Tercera Internacional de Vladimir Tatlin.
1923
Publica El alba y otras cosas, Ramonismo, sus novelas Cinelandia, El secreto del acue-
ducto –como su título indica, de temática segoviana–, El novelista , El chalet de las rosas
–ambientada en la Ciudad Lineal madrileña– y La Quinta de Palmyra , su “sinfonía portuguesa” (Valéry
Larbaud), adelantada ese mismo año en La Pluma, y sus novelas cortas El joven de las sobremesas ,
La saturada , El mestizo y La malicia de las acacias . Valéry Larbaud prologa –“cuando viajamos y
llegamos al amanecer a una ciudad, imaginamos la ventana de Ramón, ilumininada en el alba, allá en Madrid,
como un fuego de navío en la proa de Europa”– una selección de su obra, traducida por Mathilde Pomès, bajo
el título Echantillons, y con motivo de la aparición de la cual se le tributa un banquete en el Cercle Littéraire International de París, cuyo brindis es pronunciado por Daniel Halévy; el francés publica además en La
Revue Hebdomadaire un artículo sobre “Ramón Gómez de la Serna et la littérature espagnole contemporaine”. Durante esa estancia en París, conoce a Jules Supervielle –“de mi última visita a París, el más vivo
recuerdo es el de este grande hombre inesperado”–, y visita el estudio de los Delaunay, donde Robert lo
retrata y él dibuja el “Abanico de palabras para Sonia Delaunay”, de carácter caligramático, y donde coincide con Jean Cocteau y Tristan Tzara. Prologa Bazar del poeta argentino Francisco Luis Bernárdez, y
Química del espíritu, del peruano argentinizado Alberto Hidalgo, a propósito del cual habla de “saltamontismo espiritual”. Comienza a colaborar en El Sol –donde reseña Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía de Oliverio Girondo, que pronto lo visitará– y en Revista de Occidente. Conferencia en el marco de la
individual madrileña de Gustavo de Maeztu. Conferencia en Gijón sobre las farolas, presentada por José
Díaz Fernández. Conferencia, sentado en un trapecio, en el Gran Circo Americano de Madrid, con motivo de
su nombramiento como Cronista Oficial del Circo. Se le tributa un doble banquete madrileño, de lujo en
Lhardy, en el que intervienen Azorín y Vighi, y más demótico en El Oro del Rhin, convocado por los jóvenes,
entre ellos varios ultraístas, y en el que interviene Juan Gutiérrez Gili. Se celebran en Pombo un “Banquete
de fisonomías y tipos de época” y otro a Valéry Larbaud. Organiza un banquete a Luis Bagaría en el Hotel
Palace. Melchor Fernández Almagro publica en España un artículo sobre “La generación unipersonal de
Gómez de la Serna”. Guillermo de Torre le dedica un poema de Hélices. Sin quererlo, le proporciona su seudónimo al poeta peruano César Moro.
1924
Se instala en Estoril, donde comienza a construir “El Ventanal”. Publica La sagrada cripta de
Pombo –que incluye “Mi autobiografía”, y que será reseñada por Borges en Inicial y Martín Fierro–;
tres cuentos infantiles ilustrados por Rafael Barradas, En el bazar más suntuoso del mundo, El marque-
sito en el circo y Por los tejados; y sus novelas cortas Aquella novela, El vegetariano y De otra
raza. Prologa Querido de Colette, El vellocino de oro de Jean de Gourmont, y El poeta asesinado de Guillaume
Apollinaire, en traducción de Cansinos-Asséns. Colabora con 18 greguerías en El archipiélago de la muñequería, “novela en colores” de Antoniorrobles. Aparece en francés Seins, con ilustraciones de Pierre Bonnard;
polémica, con tal motivo, con Nathalie Clifford Barney, “la amazona” de Rémy de Gourmont. Reseña Fervor de
Buenos Aires (1923), el primer poemario de Jorge Luis Borges, en Revista de Occidente. Valéry Larbaud
publica un artículo sobre él en La Revue Européenne. Gerardo Diego le dedica un poema de Manual de espu-
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mas. Jean Cassou le dedica una semblanza en Nouvelle Revue Française, donde lo ve “como un hermano de
Jean Giraudoux y de Max Jacob”. Benjamín Jarnés publica en Proa su artículo “Los tres Ramones”. Propone el
sumario del número español de Intentions. Figura entre los impulsores de la antología póstuma del poeta ultraísta José de Ciria y Escalante. Colabora en Tableros, donde publica un texto sobre Charlie Chaplin, y en Ronsel
de Lugo. “Le charlotisme” es traducido en Le Disque Vert de Bruselas.
1925
Publica Caprichos y sus novelas cortas La fúnebre, ¡Hay que matar al morse!, El inen-
contrable y La virgen pintada de rojo. Prologa Il y a, libro póstumo y misceláneo de Guillaume
Apollinaire. Ortega y Gasset se refiere a su obra en La deshumanización del arte, comparándola con las de
Marcel Proust y James Joyce. Colabora en el número monográfico sobre Lautréamont de Le Disque Vert, número
al que Paul Éluard dará un varapalo en las páginas de La Révolution Surréaliste. La revista Martín Fierro de
Buenos Aires publica como suplemento una hoja naranja de bienvenida a Ramón, con motivo de un viaje argentino finalmente no realizado, como se indica en la nota que la abre; en ella, además de él mismo, colaboran Francisco Luis Bernárdez, Borges, Brandán Caraffa, Arturo Cancela, Macedonio Fernández –que lo llamará “criollo
de allá”, y con el que a lo largo de los años siguientes mantendrá correspondencia–, Oliverio Girondo –que realiza
además un espectacular dibujo alegórico–, Ricardo Güiraldes, Alberto Hidalgo, Evar Méndez, Sergio Piñero hijo
y el arquitecto Alberto Prebisch. Girondo le dedica su poema “Calle de las Sierpes” de Calcomanías, y Jules
Supervielle otro de Gravitations.
1926
Publica Gollerías, Greguerías escogidas, su novela El torero Caracho, y bajo el título El
drama del palacio deshabitado, un volumen, cuya cubierta retoma un dibujo de Julio Antonio,
que recoge su teatro de la época de Prometeo. Prologa Maelstrom del guatemalteco Luis Cardoza y Aragón.
Valéry Larbaud, en su “Lettre de Lisbone à quelques amis”, publicada en Nouvelle Revue Française, se refiere
a su encuentro allá con el escritor, que fue uno de los oradores en el banquete que se le tributó al francés:
“Ramón, al cual yo creía completamente aislado en Portugal, era ahí, por el contrario, el centro de un grupo de
jóvenes escritores de vanguardia”. Abandona definitivamente Estoril, trasladando su residencia a Nápoles –“la
luz de Nápoles es la que mejor me ha sentado en la vida y siempre sostendré que allí está el rincón ideal del
mundo”, dirá en Automoribundia–; a propósito de aquella estancia italiana, Rafael Sánchez Mazas publica
en ABC su artículo “Ramón en las Hespérides”. Massimo Bontempelli lo incorpora, junto a James Joyce, Georg
Kaiser y Pierre Mac Orlan, al comité de redacción de 900, los “Cahiers d’Italie et d’Europe” trimestrales que ha
fundado con Curzio Malaparte y su editorial La Voce; en el primer número aparecen, traducidas por Mario da
Silva, unas “Fantasmagories”.
1927
Publica Las 636 mejores greguerías, sus recopilaciones de novelas cortas Seis falsas nove-
las y La malicia de las acacias; La mujer de ámbar, novela esta última inspirada en Nápo-
les; y su novela corta El hijo del millonario. La aparición en francés de Le cirque, en la editorial Kra de
París, suscita una glosa de Walter Benjamin en Internationale Revue de Amsterdam. Banquete pombiano a
Azorín. Aparición de La Gaceta Literaria, dirigida por Ernesto Giménez Caballero, del que ese año reseña
Los toros, las castañuelas y la Virgen en Revista de Occidente, y con el que durante los meses precedentes
ha mantenido abundante correspondencia al respecto; en ella escribirá sobre Almada Negreiros –al que tributa
un homenaje en Pombo– e Ilya Ehrenburg, entre otros. Colabora con un dibujo en el primer número de Papel
de Aleluyas de Huelva. Publica en Revista de Occidente un “Réquiem por Güiraldes”. El 15 de septiembre
se difunde la falsa noticia de su muerte, a la que reacciona retitulando “Osario” su sección “Horario” de El Sol.
Conferencia oscense sobre Goya, presentada por Ramón Acín. Colabora en La Rosa de los Vientos de Tenerife. Fernando Villegas Estrada incluye su retrato en verso en Café romántico y otros poemas.
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1928
Publica Goya , su folleto Goya y la ribera del Manzanares , su novela El caballero del
hongro gris , su recopilación de novelas cortas El dueño del átomo , y sus novelas cortas La
roja y La hiperestésica . Prologa Metro: Greguerías autorizadas de Alfonso Jiménez Aquino. Colabora
en el Almanaque de las artes y las letras para 1928 de Gabriel García Maroto. Juan Ramón Jiménez escribe
su “caricatura lírica”, recogida años después en Españoles de tres mundos. Revista de Avance de La Habana
le dedica un número monográfico. Marinetti, que visita Madrid, les dedica a él, a Giménez Caballero y a
Guillermo de Torre su texto “España veloz” de La Gaceta Literaria. Estancia en París, donde frecuenta a
Norberto Beberide, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Jean Cassou, José de Creeft, Germán Cueto, la Condesa de Cuevas
de Vera, Joseph Delteil, Juan Manuel Díaz-Caneja, Adolphe de Falgairolle, Jacobo Fijman, Girondo, Max Jacob,
Edmond Jaloux, Demetrio Korsi –le dirá, hablando de América: “veo bosques de poetas y pampas de prosistas”–, Valéry Larbaud, el vizconde de Lascano-Tegui, Agustín Lazo, Germán List Arzubide, Victoria Ocampo,
Mathilde Pomès, Jean Prévost, Jules Supervielle, Tono, Arqueles Vela y Esteban Vicente, entre otros, la mayoría de los cuales frecuentan su tertulia en un café de Montparnasse, La Consigne. Pronuncia, subido en un
elefante, su conferencia del Cirque d’Hiver. Miguel Ángel Asturias le hace una entrevista para el diario guatemalteco El Imparcial en un avión que sobrevuela París, y Frédéric Lefèvre otra para su sección “Une heure
avec…” de Les Nouvelles Littéraires. Ernesto Giménez Caballero publica en el diario El Sol sus “Fichas
sobre el ramonismo”, José Bergamín en Papel de Aleluyas su “Solo de Ramón. Trompeta con sordina” y
Corpus Barga en Revista de Occidente su crónica “Ramón en París”. Estancia en un hotel de Cascais, con
la intención de recuperar El Ventanal, tarea de la que finalmente desistirá. Inicia su colaboración en el diario
bonaerense La Nación.
1929
Publica Efigies y, en la editorial de La Gaceta Literaria, Novísimas greguerías. Prologa una
antología poética de Luis de Góngora, y la edición definitiva de Levíana, del portugués António Ferro.
Escribe sobre la colectiva de los artistas españoles residentes en París del Jardín Botánico. Recibe la visita de
Paul Morand. Interviene en el banquete al escritor y periodista peruano César Falcón. Con la cara pintada de
negro, presenta en el Palacio de la Prensa de Madrid, y en el marco de las actividades del Cine-Club de La
Gaceta Literaria, la película El cantor de jazz. Por iniciativa de Valentín Andrés Álvarez, y en medio de un
gran escándalo –durante el cual Jardiel Poncela abofetea a Francisco Lucientes–, estrena en el Teatro Alcázar
Los medios seres. Vive una aventura amorosa –“el momento más delicado de mi vida”, dirá en Automoribundia– con María Álvarez de Burgos, la hija de Carmen de Burgos. “Después de veinticinco días juntos de
idilio”, a comienzos de 1930 se marcha de nuevo a París, tras pronunciar una conferencia en el Ateneo Guipuzcoano de San Sebastián. Un texto suyo sobre el cante jondo es traducido al francés por Alejo Carpentier para
Bifur. Edgar Neville incluye como prólogo a su novela Don Clorato de Potasa un texto titulado “Pequeña autobiografía (Carta a Ramón Gómez de la Serna)”.
1930
Desde la capital francesa, crónicas a El Sol, recogidas por Nigel Dennis en el volumen París (Valencia, Pre-Textos, 1986): sobre una cena con Cocteau en casa de Isabel Dato, sobre “El escándalo de
Maldoror”, sobre un proyecto de película (La bestia andaluza) de Luis Buñuel, sobre el populismo literario,
sobre las “Máscaras de hierro” de José de Creeft y Germán Cueto, sobre los “Fotógrafos nuevos”, sobre Ehrenburg, sobre Bontempelli y Pitigrilli –con este y con Cami, que le han nombrado miembro de la Academia del
Humor, proyecta una novela colectiva–, sobre Victoria Ocampo, sobre “El ojo de James Joyce”... Desde París,
participa en el viaje a Cataluña de los escritores españoles. Estancia en Berlín. Publica una biografía de Azorín
y su novela madrileña La nardo. Prologa Mapa de América del ensayista ecuatoriano Benjamín Carrión y
La callejuela de Moscú de Ilya Ehrenburg. Agitado banquete pombiano a Ernesto Giménez Caballero –Ramón
escribe un largo texto de presentación para el correspondiente folleto–, durante el cual se produce un enfren-
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tamiento entre Antonio Espina y Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, que saca una pistola. Participa como actor en la
película de Giménez Caballero Esencia de verbena, al igual que Miguel Pérez Ferrero, Samuel Ros y otros escritores amigos. Siempre en el ámbito del cine, se rueda El orador, también designada en alguna ocasión como
La mano: él, conferenciando. No se realiza, en cambio, su proyecto de película con Luis Buñuel, El periódico;
el aragonés le dirá años después a Max Aub que “Ramón Gómez de la Serna ha sido el hombre que más ha
influido en toda nuestra generación”. Artículo sobre Ángeles Santos –a la que ha visitado en Valladolid– en La
Gaceta Literaria, a cuya importante encuesta sobre la vanguardia responde: “Moriré admirando esa palabra”.
La emisora madrileña Unión Radio, con la que lleva varios años colaborando, instala un micrófono en su casa
–ese año se traslada a la calle de Villanueva, 38–, desde la que se dirige cada noche a los oyentes, con su sección
“Cronista de guardia”. Colabora en el número surrealista de Butlletí. Ramiro Ledesma Ramos lo incluye –probablemente sin su consentimiento– en la lista de colaboradores de su revista La Conquista del Estado, en la que
no figuraría su firma. Fallece Eduardo Lamela, el propietario de Pombo.
1931
Publica Ismos –en cuya cubierta figura su retrato por Diego Rivera–, Elucidario de Madrid –su
suma sobre la ciudad natal– y La hiperestésica . Colabora, con un capítulo en torno a “La cari-
dad”, en el libro colectivo Las 7 virtudes. Prologa Campeones del mundo de Paul Morand. Isaías Díaz expone
en la colectiva inaugural del Lyceum Club de Madrid un cuadro inspirado en una de sus greguerías: Pasa la
bicicleta por lo alto del camino y el paisaje se pone gafas. El 14 de abril, día de la proclamación de la
Segunda República, pasea todo el día por Madrid en compañía de Jean Cassou. Colabora en revistas anticlericales como Fray Lazo y Pele-Mele. Pronuncia en el Hotel Ritz de Barcelona una conferencia titulada “Objetos escogidos”. Asiste a la Semana de la Sabiduría de Formentor, presidida por Keyserling. Visita por vez
primera Buenos Aires, donde pronuncia conferencias en Amigos del Arte y en Signo, participa en la fiesta de
lanzamiento de Sur –revista en la que colaborará, y en la que Guillermo de Torre reseña sus conferencias– en
casa de Victoria Ocampo, recorre la ciudad en compañía de Girondo, y conoce, en el banquete que le ofrece
el PEN Club argentino, a Luisa Sofovich, escritora argentina de padres rusos, nacida en 1905, y con la que
regresará a España, no separándose nunca más. Desde ahí, visita otras ciudades del país –Mendoza, Córdoba,
Santiago del Estero, Azul–, así como Uruguay –en Montevideo conoce a Carlos W. Aliseris, Ángel Aller, Ángel
Falco, Alfredo Mario Ferreiro y Roberto Ibáñez–, Paraguay y Chile, en cuya capital unos médicos le tributan
un homenaje en un quirófano. Nunca llegaría a salir un libro que anunció poco después, Tremedal americano
y pasión de otras estrellas. El marqués de Villa-Urrutia, Manuel de Sandoval y Emilio Gutiérrez-Gamero
presentan, sin éxito, la candidatura ramoniana a la Academia Española de la Lengua. El chileno Oreste Plath
publica en La Gaceta Literaria un artículo sobre “Charlot y Ramón”. César González-Ruano publica en Ondas
un artículo sobre “Ramón y la radio”: “¡Gran Ramón! Hay que oírle cantar la misa de la Radio como a un sacerdote, y esperar siempre. El prodigio, el descubrimiento –que algunas veces está sólo en un adjetivo–, vendrá
fatalmente”.
1932
Fallece Carmen de Burgos, a la que Ramón ha visitado hasta el último día. Publica su novela Poli-
céfalo y señora, dedicada a Victoria Ocampo, y su novela corta Las consignatarias. Escribe
el libreto de la ópera Charlot de Salvador Bacarisse. Prologa una Antología de la poesía de Mauricio Bacarisse. Publica en Arte un artículo sobre Solana, y en Cahiers d’Art otro sobre Picasso. Colabora como conferenciante para los Comités de Cooperación Intelectual de la República, interviniendo en Burgos, Lugo, Palencia,
Santiago de Compostela, Segovia, Sevilla, Valladolid y Vigo. Participa en el homenaje póstumo a María Blanchard del Ateneo de Madrid. Lino Novás Calvo lo retrata sobre fondo de Pombo en un artículo para Revista
Bimestre Cubana. Celebra el Premio Mariano de Cavia otorgado a César González-Ruano: “El éxito de González-Ruano está en que da aire literario a todas las cosas que hace”.
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1933
Como miembro del comité de la Exposición del Libro Español, visita por segunda vez Buenos Aires,
a donde se lleva enrollado el cuadro solanesco La tertulia de Pombo como punto de arranque
para una conferencia sobre los cafés literarios, nuevamente en Amigos del Arte. Pronuncia conferencias en
Bahía Blanca, Salta y otras ciudades. Lola Membrives representa Los medios seres en el Teatro Maipo. Frustrado intento de montar el Charlot de Bacarisse en el Teatro Colón, por iniciativa de Victoria Ocampo y Juan
José Castro; él propone que para el estreno se contrate al propio Chaplin. De nuevo en Madrid, Luisa Sofovich
enferma gravemente de septicemia. Prologa Contrapelo de F. di Giglio. Publica en Arte un artículo sobre Norah
Borges. Alexander Calder visita Madrid con su circo en miniatura, del que da dos representaciones en la Residencia de Estudiantes; el escultor visita Pombo y el estudio ramoniano; según Luisa Sofovich, el organizador
de las representaciones habría sido el escritor, que intervino en ellas como orador.
1934
1935
Publica en Cruz y Raya su decisivo “Ensayo sobre lo cursi” y en Revista de Occidente otro sobre
“Las cosas y el ello”. Colabora en Diablo Mundo, el semanario de Corpus Barga.
Publica Los muertos, las muertas y otras fantasmagorías , Flor de greguerías , una
biografía de El Greco y, en la revista Cruz y Raya, su drama Escaleras, que ilustra José Caba-
llero, y una selección de Greguerías 1935. Prologa Sol de la noche de la poetisa Ruth de Velázquez, y El
diablo y la técnica del arquitecto y humorista peruano Héctor Velarde. Colabora en Almanaque Literario
1935 de Miguel Pérez Ferrero, Esteban Salazar Chapela y Guillermo de Torre, y en El aviso de escarmentados del año que acaba y escarmiento para avisados del que empieza de 1935, de Cruz y Raya. Pronuncia conferencias en París y Bruselas, acompañado por Luisa Sofovich, que relatará el viaje en La vida sin
Ramón, mencionando encuentros con Cassou y Cocteau. Aparece en Cruz y Raya la primera biografía que se
le dedica, “Vida de Ramón”, de Miguel Pérez Ferrero. Pedro Salinas publica en Índice Literario un “Escorzo
de Ramón”, y Guillermo de Torre en Diario de Madrid un artículo sobre “Picasso y Ramón”. Participa, junto
con Antoniorrobles y Salvador Bartolozzi, en la cabalgata madrileña de los Reyes Magos.
1936
Publica, en el último número de Cruz y Raya, una selección de “Greguerías nuevas”. Presenta la
conferencia madrileña de Paul Éluard sobre surrealismo del Ateneo de Madrid. Colabora en el
número picassiano de Gaceta de Arte de Tenerife. Necrológica radiofónica de Eugenio Noel. Asiste al banquete
en el Hotel Ritz por las bodas de plata de su promoción de Derecho. Participa en las visitas a los cementerios románticos organizadas por Mariano Rodríguez de Rivas, y de las que le hablará Agustín de Foxá a Curzio
Malaparte, que lo recogerá en Kaputt. Le entrega a Neruda un texto sobre Julio Herrera y Reissig destinado
a un número monográfico de Caballo verde para la poesía que finalmente no saldría. El estallido de la guerra
civil le sorprende en Madrid. Según Nicanor del Pardo, uno de los asistentes, la tertulia pombiana del sábado
18 de julio “ofrecía un aspecto muy distinto al normal”: “Nuestra reunión alegre, bullanguera y hasta disparatada, se había convertido en una especie de velatorio”. Figura en la lista de los fundadores de la Alianza de
Intelectuales Antifascistas para la Defensa de la Cultura. A pesar de ello, le alarman muchas cosas, y especialmente la estampa de Pedro Luis de Gálvez armado hasta los dientes, contemplada en las proximidades
del Lyon d’Or. En agosto decide marchar con Luisa Sofovich a Buenos Aires –el pretexto es el congreso internacional del PEN Club–. Alicante –a donde llegan en el coche del agregado cultural argentino–, Marsella y
Burdeos son las etapas iniciales del viaje, que incluye también una etapa montevideana, durante la cual ve a
Ángel Aller. En la capital argentina, tras una temporada en un hotel, encuentran un apartamento en el 1974
de la calle Victoria, luego de Hipólito Yrigoyen, donde él reconstruye su despacho-cueva. Publica, en Santiago
de Chile, su novela ¡Rebeca! Prologa La gruta artificial, de Luisa Sofovich, y Todo el mundo sabe que
esto son diez dedos, de Cardenio, caricaturista español residente en Chile. Durante la contienda, pese a
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haber recibido ofrecimientos del bando republicano –le proponen colaboración José Bergamín en El Mono
Azul, y José Luis Salado en La Voz–, terminará decantándose por el franquista. Su casa madrileña, confiada
a Salvador Bartolozzi, será saqueada, desapareciendo todas sus pertenencias. La tertulia de Pombo de
Solana es recogido por la Junta de Salvamento del Tesoro Artístico, y trasladado al Museo del Prado; en la
operación intervienen, entre otros, Francisco Mateos, Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino, Daniel Vázquez Díaz y
Eduardo Vicente.
1937
1938
Publica la recopilación de novelas cortas El cólera azul.
Publica en Sur su retrato de Girondo. En Música, revista del bando republicano, se publica la primera
página de la partitura del Charlot de Bacarisse, que por aquel entonces se quiere montar en el Liceu
de Barcelona.
1939
Unos meses después del término de la guerra civil, La tertulia de Pombo de Solana es trasladado de nuevo al café, donde al año siguiente la tertulia se reconstituye en torno a José Sanz y Díaz,
y donde se instala un friso de caricaturas de pombianos por Luis Lasa. En una carta a Giménez Caballero,
comenta: “Con Sánchez Mazas, con José María Alfaro, con Manuel Aznar estoy gestionando hace meses un
puesto en el periodismo madrileño”.
1940
1941
Publica en Austral una selección de Greguerías.
Publica Retratos contemporáneos, y una edición refundida en un volumen, con nuevos materiales, de los dos en torno a Pombo, dedicada a Jardiel Poncela. Con motivo de la aparición del primero
de estos libros, se le tributa un banquete, en el que Norah Lange pronuncia un discurso.
1942
Publica Mi tía Carolina Coronado , una biografía de Nerval y una monografía sobre Maruja
Mallo. Empieza a publicar en Revista de Indias de Bogotá fragmentos de lo que sería luego Auto-
moribundia .
1943
Publica Lo cursi y otros ensayos, y una monografía sobre Velázquez. Prologa una antología
de escritos sobre arte de John Ruskin. Reedición ampliada –con dos capítulos, “Ducassismo”, sobre
Lautréamont, y “Daliismo”– de Ismos, libro que será determinante para afianzar la vocación artística de Antonio Saura. Reedición por el editor barcelonés José Janés de El circo, con un prólogo de su hermano Julio.
1944
Publica Doña Juana la Loca , y sus biografías de Lope de Vega , Don Ramón María del
Valle-Inclán y José Gutiérrez Solana. Aparece en Escorial “La emparedada de Burgos”. Prologa
Papeles de recienvenido de Macedonio Fernández, una antología de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, y otra
de escritos sobre arte de Oscar Wilde. Gracias a José Ignacio Ramos, inicia su colaboración en el diario madrileño Arriba, donde su sección se titula inicialmente “De orilla a orilla”, pasando luego a “Nostalgias”. Entrega
a José Antonio Giménez Arnau, secretario de Embajada en Buenos Aires, un retrato literario del poeta uruguayo
Julio Herrera y Reissig –lo más probable es que se trate del texto de 1936 destinado a Caballo verde para la
poesía–, y su novela corta Museo de reproducciones; ambos textos serán editados muchos años después:
Museo de reproducciones (Barcelona, Destino, 1980), con prólogo de Francisco Yndurain.
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1945
Publica Nuevos retratos contemporáneos, Completa y verídica historia de Picasso
y el cubismo –en realidad una edición italiana exenta del capítulo “Picassismo” de Ismos– y una
monografía sobre Norah Borges . El pintor y marinero brasileño José Pancetti se autorretrata, en Autovida, con la segunda edición de Ismos en la mano. Giovanni Papini incluye en Gog una semblanza ramoniana
sobre fondo de Pombo. El Ayuntamiento de Madrid le otorga su Medalla de Plata.
1946
Aparece una edición refundida de Gollerías. En Arriba se publica “La felicitación de Pascuas de
Ramón Gómez de la Serna”, un fragmento de una carta al director del diario, Xavier Echarri: “Desde
aquí veo ahora a España más limpia de malos contactos que nunca, y ahora les toca a ustedes ser rigurosos para
que no entren en ella turistas indeseables. Tienen ustedes de su parte a Dios, y el Arcángel de la espada flamígera debe echar de ese Paraíso hermético, como sólo lo es el Paraíso, a todos los que no merezcan estar en él.
La más pura de las iniciativas, la de estar solos y sin contagio, les ha sido concedida. ¡A disfrutarla!”
1947
Fallece en Madrid su hermana Dolores. Publica su novela El hombre perdido, Cuentos de fin
de año –ilustrado por Eduardo Vicente–, Trampantojos, y unas Greguerías completas. Pleni-
tud edita un volumen de sus Obras Selectas. Dona La tertulia de Pombo de Solana al Museo de Arte
Moderno de Madrid, que tras ciertas dificultades con una heredera del dueño del café, finalmente lo recibe. El
cuadro viaja al Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, en el marco de una exposición de arte español; delante
del mismo, pronuncia una conferencia sobre su autor.
1948
1949
Publica Automoribundia , su obra maestra absoluta, y Explicación de Buenos Aires . José
María Pemán publica en ABC una tercera en torno a “El Dios de Gómez de la Serna”.
Publica Las tres gracias –subtitulada “Novela madrileña de invierno”–, Interpretación del
tango y Cartas a las golondrinas. Prologa Libro de Madrid de su sobrino Gaspar Gómez de la
Serna, con ilustraciones de Juan Esplandiu. Viaje a España con Luisa Sofovich, organizado por la Dirección
General de Propaganda, cuyo titular es Pedro Rocamora. Tras arribar en barco a Bilbao, y hacer noche en el
Hotel Carlton, llegan a Madrid en un coche oficial, alojándose en el Hotel Ritz. Celebra cuatro tertulias en Pombo,
la primera de ellas retransmitida radiofónicamente. Se le tributan banquetes en Arriba, en el Rastro, en Biarritz
–por el Gremio de Libreros–, en El Púlpito –por el Ayuntamiento– y en Botín, este último con discurso de Edgar
Neville. Mariano Rodríguez de Rivas organiza una recepción en su honor en el Museo Romántico. Giménez Caballero lo recibe en su tertulia del Café de Levante. Hay otra recepción en la editorial Afrodisio Aguado. Pronuncia conferencias en el Ateneo –“La magia de la literatura”– y en el Teatro Lara –“Mi tía Carolina Coronado”–. El
Ayuntamiento coloca una placa en su casa natal, celebrándose un acto, al que asiste. Visita, en el Palacio del
Pardo, a Francisco Franco; en su libro Ramón de Ramones da detallada noticia de la misma Rafael Flórez,
que conoció al autor durante aquel viaje. Marchan a Barcelona, en tren; en la capital catalana da conferencias,
y ve a Sebastià Gasch y a Ángel Zúñiga, entre otros. Regresan en el mismo barco, Bilbao-Buenos Aires. Es uno
de los firmantes del Homenaje a Antonio de Undurraga, poeta chileno.
1950
Con motivo del cierre definitivo del café, en cuyo lugar se instala una maletería, publica en Arriba
unas “Exequias de Pombo”. Mariano Rodríguez de Rivas adquiere una de las mesas de mármol del
mismo, con destino al Museo Romántico. Es nombrado miembro del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños. Inicia su
colaboración en la revista Clavileño de Madrid.
1952
Correspondencia con Rafael Flórez a propósito de la muerte de Enrique Jardiel Poncela, “nuestro
admirado desaparecido que reaparecerá siempre en la historia de las Letras”.
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1953
Publica biografías de Quevedo –“En memoria de Macedonio Fernández, el Quevedo criollo, como
homenaje de imperecedera admiración”– y Edgar Allan Poe . Fallece en Santiago de Chile su
hermano José. Recibe un premio argentino de televisión.
1954
1955
Carta a Gloria Fuertes, dada a conocer en el libro póstumo de la poetisa Glorierías (Madrid, Torremozas, 2001), un homenaje, desde el título mismo, a las greguerías ramonianas.
Con motivo de sus bodas de oro con la literatura, las editoriales argentinas Emecé, Espasa-Calpe
Argentina, Losada, Poseidón y Sudamericana se asocian para publicar una antología de su obra, prolo-
gada por Guillermo de Torre. Publica Total de greguerías. Escribe el epílogo de Crónica del Café Gijón
de Marino Gómez Santos. Le tributan una cena de homenaje Rafael Alberti, Rafael Dieste, María Teresa León,
Luis Seoane, Lorenzo Varela y otros exiliados. La revista madrileña Indice le dedica un número monográfico,
en el que colaboran, entre otros, Ricardo Baeza, Tomás Borrás, Antonio Díaz Cañabate, Edgar Neville –“Ramón,
el buque nodriza”– y José María Pemán, así como escritores más jóvenes, como Julián Ayesta, Eusebio García
Luengo, Marino Gómez Santos y Gaspar Gómez de la Serna. W.M. Bonermann presenta en la New York University una tesis doctoral sobre Ramón Gómez de la Serna and the greguería.
1956
Publica Cartas a mí mismo y Nostalgias de Madrid. La editorial AHR saca a la luz el primer
volumen de sus Obras Completas, de los que el segundo y último –tenían que haber sido varios
más– saldría al año siguiente. Inicia su colaboración en el diario bonaerense Clarín. Artículo sobre Maruja Mallo
en Atlántida.
1957
Publica Mis mejores páginas literarias y Nuevas páginas de mi vida , subtitulado “Lo
que no dije en Automoribundia”, y el que entre otros asuntos habla de “El retrato perdido” –el
suyo por Diego Rivera– y de “Una ópera malograda” –su Charlot con Bacarisse– y en cuya cubierta se reproduce un bodegón ramoniano de Gregorio Prieto. Luis Cernuda incluye en Estudios sobre la poesía española
contemporánea uno, fundamental, en torno a “Gómez de la Serna y la generación poética de 1925”. Neruda,
recién salido de una cárcel argentina, lo visita en Buenos Aires. Aparece la monografía sobre su obra del profesor costarricense Rodolfo Cardona.
1958
1953
1960
1961
Publica Flor de greguerías.
Aguilar reúne sus Biografías completas. El gobierno español le otorga la Gran Cruz de Alfonso X
el Sabio. Pablo Neruda le dedica una oda.
Juventud publica una edición abreviada, de bolsillo, de Pombo. Estancia veraniega en Uruguay. Recibe
el Premio Juan Palomo, instituido en Madrid por Manuel Halcón.
Se casa por la Iglesia con Luisa Sofovich. Publica la que será su última novela, Piso bajo , de
temática madrileña. El Rastro se reedita como Guía del Rastro , con excelentes fotografías del
cineasta Carlos Saura –en 2002 aparecería en Círculo de Lectores una reedición, con más fotografías, y mejor
impresa–, y viñetas y mapa de Eduardo Vicente. Aguilar reúne sus Retratos completos . Abandona su
colaboración en Arriba, pasando a ABC, donde publicará una sección de “Greguerías inéditas”, ilustrada
por Lorenzo Goñi.
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1962
Aparece una antología de su obra, prologada por Luisa Sofovich, y editada por el Ministerio de Educación y Justicia de Argentina. Recibe el Premio Madrid de la Fundación Juan March. El Congreso argen-
tino le concede una pensión vitalicia de cinco mil pesos mensuales.
1963
Fallece en Buenos Aires el 12 de enero. La capilla ardiente es instalada en la Institución Cultural Española. Entre las necrológicas, mencionemos las de Enrique de Aguinaga, Manuel Alcántara, Juan Apari-
cio, Camilo José Cela, Evaristo Correa Calderón, Francisco de Cossío, Antonio Díaz-Cañabate, Guillermo
Díaz-Plaja, Gerardo Diego, Joaquín de Entrambasaguas, Antonio Espina, Melchor Fernández Almagro, Rafael
García Serrano, Luis Gómez Mesa, César González-Ruano –que lo designa como “Ramón del alma mía”–, Salvador Jiménez, Alfredo Marqueríe, Edgar Neville, Antonio de Obregón, Josep Pla, Esteban Salazar Chapela, Manuel
Sánchez Camargo, Dámaso Santos, Guillermo de Torre y Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. Recibe también los homenajes dibujados de Antonio Mingote y de Máximo. Diez días después, sus restos mortales son trasladados en
avión a Madrid, instalándose la capilla ardiente en el Patio de Cristales del Ayuntamiento. Muchos años después,
Francisco Umbral hará, en el lugar correspondiente de La noche que llegué al Café Gijón, la crónica de su
entierro en la Sacramental de San Justo, junto a la tumba de Larra. José Camón Aznar pronuncia una conferencia sobre él en el Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, Gaspar Gómez de la Serna otra en el Colegio Mayor Covarrubias, y Gerardo Diego otra más, en el Ateneo, sobre Lope y Ramón. Aparecen las biografías que le dedican
Gaspar Gómez de la Serna –que obtuvo por ella el Premio Nacional de Ensayo–, y Luis S. Granjel. En julio, el
Ayuntamiento le dedica un homenaje póstumo en la Plaza Mayor, estrenando su drama Escaleras. Aparece
en la editorial Dynamo de Lieja, Apologie de la linotype, traducción al francés, prologada por Franz Hellens,
de un texto ramoniano inédito.
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english translations
Notes for a readeing of Ramón’s -isms
one of the most blasphemous things ever invented”; they met again (this time
Benedetta was also there) in the Madrid of 1928.
Juan Manuel Bonet
El Rastro: still doomed to local consumption, one of the great books of Spanish and European modernity. In it Ramón, as I have attempted to analyse elsewhere
(“Ramón y los objetos”, catalogue El objeto surrealista en España, Museo de
Teruel, 1990), is several years ahead of André Breton’s strolls around the Puces de
Saint-Ouen, in Paris, recounted in Nadja. “With an indescribable regularity, the
regularity of a bat”, he wanders around that “well bucket of things” and lays siege
to a thousand and one “discarded objects” (with inklings of the flea market, he
wrote “one should ransack things” in El libro mudo), a thousand and one remains
of the shipwreck, and writes his litany, resorting to the modern procedure par
excellence of chaotic enumeration. Unforgettable pages indeed. And also difficult
to beat: nobody wrote like that back then, between you and me. I agree with César
Nicolás: “El Rastro revisits the costumbrista and decadent (contained in the
clichés of that place) extracting from them no less that the new, the chaotic and
libertarian subconscious, the seed of Dada and the Surreal”.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna is an absolutely central figure in the landscape of
Spanish modernity. The purpose of this exhibition is to relive today a few of the key
moments of this centrality—although I have not counted, I have the impression that
his is the most frequently quoted name in a particular Dictionary of Spanish Avantgarde—through Ismos, the masterly book he published in 1931.
Like so many other members of the international avant-garde that began to
establish itself in the leading Western cities from 1900 onwards, from Ezra Pound
to Pessoa, from Picasso to Brancusi, from Apollinaire to Marcel Duchamp, from
Alfred Stieglitz to the German expressionist poets and painters, and from Erik Satie
to Varèse, Ramón hailed from a symbolist background. In this connection, it is
fascinating to study the tables of contents of his review Prometeo in order to trace
how his personal development is based on such foundations, largely French,
Mercure de France, including Lautréamont.
Ramón the symbolist. His two Juanramonian poems in Prometeo are rather
middling. However, what wonderful prose on Moguer, in Tapices, or the whole of
that extraordinary book marking the transition to modernity, El libro mudo–-see
Ioana Zlotescu’s enlightening prologue to the re-edition—or in El alba y otras
cosas the page on dawn in the Plaza de Oriente or the other one on trams in winter,
or this one, pure Jules Laforgue, in Pombo, in one of his European letters to the
Pombians, written from Florence: “Sundays, as you know, Sundays are sad everywhere, sad even for the dead, sad even in Paradise which, although full of military
music on Sundays, has a sad sorrow. On Sunday the unity of all heaven and all earth
becomes primordial unity once again”.
Ramón the symbolist, also in art. His points of departure from 1905-1915
were, among others, Julio Antonio, Salvador Bartolozzi, Miguel Viladrich—“a man
of gold and steel”—Francisco Iturrino (preferred to Zuloaga and Anglada Camarasa), Gustavo de Maeztu, also a writer, the Zubiaurre brothers, Julián Tellaeche,
the Juanramonian Santiago Rusiñol, Juan de Echevarría, Julio Romero de Torres
the singer of “Córdoba the dead”, Anselmo Miguel Nieto, the great José Gutiérrez
Solana, Victorio Macho (on whose Cristo del Otero a curious page was to be
published in Diario póstumo) and countless draughtsmen, illustrators and caricaturists, perhaps headed by the forgotten and most interesting Rafael Romero
Calvet, whom Juan Pérez de Ayala rehabilitates in his prologue to the exhibition on
the Mapfre collection of drawings by Ramón.… It was from here, from this haze that
the sharp edges of Cubism emerged, of the avant-garde, of what the new painters
of Paris led by Picasso were up to.
Ramón-Marinetti. In 1909, on publishing in Prometeo Marinetti’s Futurist
manifesto, which had recently appeared in the Parisian daily Le Figaro, followed a
year later by the “Futurist proclamation to the Spanish”, Ramón initiated the Spanish
avant-garde. However, despite the parody of “the lunatic” in “Tristan”, he was to
retain very little of Futurism in his private ideology and his writings, which were
nonetheless soon invaded by the geometry and siege of the Cubists. As he recalls
in the chapter of Ismos on “Futurism”, a chapter full of endearment but also of irony,
“Everything is unacceptable and false in this religion, for Marinetti goes as far as
saying that the motorcycle is divine—an intolerable statement, for the motorcycle is
Apropos of the Rastro and objects, we should refer—as I did also in the aforementioned catalogue of the Teruel exhibition—to Ramón’s successive studies, with
something of Schwitters’ merzbau avant la lettre. On the Spanish scene only César
González-Ruano, many years later—in the very Ramonian Libro de los objetos
perdidos y encontrados (1959)—was to display a similar passion and curiosity for
objects, a similar compulsive, Cornellian interest in things piled up in rastros, marchés aux puces or flea markets. But the author of Mi medio siglo se confiesa a
medias, whose house in Madrid I came to visit when its dweller had long been
absent, never attained the category of creator of an environment, a category which
Ramón displays in his successive studies. Assembling the Buenos Aires one, a task
I experienced in 1980 at the Museo Municipal of Madrid, entailed coming into
contact again with the Christmas baubles, the bevelled mirrors, the screen
plastered in photographs, the strangest of knickknacks—”things from my turret” as
he referred to them in “Mi autobiografía”—transformed by their collector into part of
a meaningful whole, of a “house of life”, in the style of Mario Praz.
Also in connection with the Rastro and objects: the most surprising of Ramón’s
surprising lectures, with something of a happening or performance or ZAJ ritual,
must undoubtedly have been the suitcase-lecture, from which he brought out all
kinds of objects. According to the chronicle of Guillermo de Torre in the Buenos
Aires Sur, 1931, these were: butterflies, starfish, coloured baubles, paper flowers,
puppets, a goddess with many arms, an arm-reliquary, a mechanical quail, a
monocle without a lens, a magic box, a knife-grinder’s whistle… On occasions, they
ended with the ritual destruction of a “lamentable object ”.
Pombo: by founding, in 1915, an avant-garde literary circle in a romantic café,
from the era of his admired Mariano José de Larra, in a gas lit café, Ramón unites
past, present and future. “The blackness with which the power of the gas coats the
lamps is the blackness of an apse. This thick darkness is a torch, height, the
elevation of a crypt at night“. The two books he devoted to the “supreme café”,
which he was also to describe as a catacomb, hermitage, synagogue, cave and
even harbour café, are fabulous and surprisingly modern. In the first volume suffice
it to recall in this connection, behind the black cover by Romero Calvet: the pages
on gaslight (from which the previous paragraph is taken), electric light and mirrors;
the bold typographic games with which it is peppered (he brilliantly retrieves
popular typographies); or the group activities (which Ramón calls “entertainments”)
reflected in it, such as “mosaic” or “absurd”, the former taken from automatic writing
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and the latter from the cadavres exquis; or the “expressive word contests”, or
“kleksographies”, or “trivial dialogues”, of “sheer triviality, triviality and maximum
incoherence”. But someone, some day, was to shed more light, a different light, on
Ramón’s invention of the café, on the major figures—José Gutiérrez Solana, Picasso,
Diego Rivera, Lipchitz, Valéry Larbaud, Paul Morand, Borges, Calder—and minor
ones, of whom four of the many possible names are: the Murcia-born postmodernist poet Francisco Martínez Corbalán, the odd and disorientated Dutch
draughtswoman Betina Jacometti, “like a svelte female microbe”, the outrageous
Iván de Nogales, the poet Ruth de Velázquez with her round “optic acrobat’s” card
and those we might term “intermediate”—Waldo Frank, Giovanni Papini—who
passed by there, and also on each and every one of the banquets held there, which
as a whole make up the literary and artistic landscape of Ramón’s Spain, in short of
the best Spain of that time.
Also in 1915, three years after the group exhibition on Cubism at the Galeries
Dalmau in Barcelona, Ramón sponsored the exhibition on Pintores Íntegros, the
first presentation of Cubism in Madrid—though he shunned this label, finding it too
formalistic—which was to be a major succès de scandale. Following a mistaken
approach stemming from a misinterpretation of José Francés’s account of the
exhibition, we are now familiar with Ramón’s prologue to the catalogue and know
for certain who the prominent figures were: the Cubist-influenced caricature artist
Luis Bagaría (also from a symbolist background—the Barcelona of Els Quatre Gats),
sculptor Agustín “El Choco”, and painters María Blanchard (“the childish witch who
knows all truths for sure, a nun of her art”) and Diego Rivera. Íntegros (Upright): this
term, charged with moral connotations, had been previously used by Ramón in El
Rastro.
Yet again the decisive year 1915: the Cubist portrait of Ramón by Diego Rivera,
whom he admired, the one that led Ramón to exclaim, “What a man!” at the Pombo.
A picture which “was painted on long afternoons, magically” and displays everything that was important in Ramón’s world including, on the right, as Ioana Zlotescu
points out, the geometric cover of El libro mudo. A crucial stage in the writer’s
dialogue with the avant-garde. Aware of the importance of that dialogue, he returns
to this moment in several texts, including the nostalgic one in Nuevas páginas de
mi vida, where he tells of the disappearance of the painting during the upheaval of
the civil war: “And it is no consolation to know about others that are also missing,
among them a Miró belonging to the Countess of Yebes, with a marvellous blue and
a circus ladder reaching up to the sky in search of a clownish moon”. The synthesis
of local tradition and avant-garde displayed in this painting, now owned by the
MALBA in Buenos Aires (just as the sitter had predicted: “one day it will appear in
an auction, in a museum, by then irrecoverable”), foreshadows the combination of
nationalism and avant-garde that was to underpin Rivera’s mature art, the first major
achievement of which, still in Cubist style, is the Paisaje zapatista (1915), painted
in Paris.
Ramón and African art. He says he began to collect it “before Cubism”, gathering idols at Madrid’s Rastro, “in the lakes region of the Rastro”. He also recalls a
shop near the Feria da Ladra in Lisbon. He says that he then found Paris “inundated
with black idols”. There is no way of checking this sequence. Whatever the case, as
many scholars have studied this, including Carl Einstein back then and, more
academically, Robert Goldwater (in Primitivism and Modern Art), it is obvious that
African art is a key to the genesis of modern art. Those early avant-garde years
witnessed abundant exhibitions and books about African art, reflections on what
Paul Morand was to call Magie noire in one of his definitive titles. In other respects,
jazz—another art to which Ramón was sensitive, as were Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud,
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Erwin Schulhoff and Federico Elizalde around the same time—was to exert a
decisive influence on highbrow music. Ramón, whether or not a forerunner, shared
this period taste which, as he himself recalls, led Cocteau to state that: “The black
crisis has become as boring as Mallarmean japonisme”. We have his copy of Blaise
Cendrars’ Anthologie nègre, with an annotation in black ink on the cover. However,
we do not know what has become of his idols, or of the one he gave to Girondo,
on the top of whose head, he says, was a small mirror.
Ramón-Lipchitz. In the Madrid of 1915, Ramón’s aforementioned cult of African
art coincided with that of the Lithuanian sculptor, whom he referred to in several
different ways in successive books, unable to master the spelling of his name.
This cult was also shared by Picasso, who owned a veritable “college of idols”.
But, as he recalls in Pombo, he also learned from him that “sculpture is (…) a
construction”. And solemnly, he underlines the importance of his dealings with
Lipchitz: “The fact the man with this new audacity was in Pombo enables the
importance of the Crypt to be more easily understood”.
1916: the creacionista future. Vicente Huidobro, who was to advocate “creating
a poem just as nature creates a tree” and in 1918 ignited the fuse of ultraísmo,
visited Madrid for the first time and saw Ramón in the café, who described him as
follows in Pombo: “Vicente Huidobro, a strange boy—bearer of a strange mission—
who dropped by the Pombo on his stopover from America to Paris”. Although we
know of a copy of Saisons choisies with a handwritten dedication to Ramón, the
friendship does not appear to have prospered.
Picasso at the Pombo, 1917: for the premiere of Erik Satie’s Parade at the
Teatro Real, the sets of which Picasso had designed; this was one of the great
moments of the café in Calle Carretas and the last time the painter was to visit the
Spanish capital. The paragraph Ramón devotes to that visit in Pombo could not
have a more expressive start: “Picasso turned up at the Pombo one day. It was
miraculous and momentous”. He goes on to tell of the visit he had paid Picasso
several months earlier in Paris, and again brings up the subject of African art: “I lived
among his numerous pictures (…), among his idols grouped together like a village
of intransigent black gods, each other’s enemies, among cuttings and specimen
pieces of all things”, and so on. Ramón ends by stating that: “Picasso at the Pombo
was cheerful, among others of his kind, smiling like the Spaniard who after his
victories abroad, back in Spain, brought out his small, lost, Spanish smile of a man
who has neither been anywhere nor is going anywhere but is”. And several pages
on, he cites fragments of his own speech delivered that Saturday, fragments in
which what most draws our attention is the “What a long exodus Picasso’s!” In
La sagrada cripta de Pombo he reproduces a fuzzy photograph of the banquet
in which unfortunately it is practically impossible to identify anyone except the
painter. In Ismos, he stated that “In Picasso Cubism vindicates its Spanish tradition”. And he was to regard him as “the Spanish individualist”, he who “flees from
those who pursue him, leaving them on the corners of disorientation”. And he was
to recall his pictures on the Anís del Mono anisette. And, recalling the influence of
the summers on the Cote d’Azur, he was to refer superbly to his Neoclassical
period. (Ramón-Picasso: a tandem quoted on more than one occasions by critics,
from the pioneering intuitions of Ángel Aller and Guillermo de Torre).
Parade, 1917. That same year Ramón published another of his masterpieces,
El circo, the French translation of which years later was to merit a commentary by
Walter Benjamin, which was published in this country in El Europeo, translated into
Spanish by José Muñoz Millanes. It is a cumulative book, also excessive, full of
intuitions, greguerías and calligrammes, in which what grabs our attention with
respect to the present exhibition is his praise of the motion picture posters and the
anonymous “eccentric painters” responsible for them. The circus was at the height
of fashion in music, literature and painting—from Seurat to Solano, through early
twentieth-century Picasso—and also in the cinema. This phenomenon drew the
attention of writers of chronicles on Paris, such as César Vallejo and Alejo
Carpentier. In one of his chronicles for the Havana Carteles in 1929, the latter
wrote: “The circus ages terribly. Its appeal is now almost literary. The ring attracts
us, above all, because it evokes a beautiful canvas of Seurat and a few of Ramón
Gómez de la Serna’s greguerías”. But despite this pessimistic prediction, the avantgarde culmination of this process was yet to be seen: Calder, whose wire circus
Ramón was to sponsor in Madrid of 1933.
Marie Laurencin and her friend the dressmaker Nicole Groult, at Pombo. How
aptly the subtle and evanescent art of the painter is described in Pombo (the text
is taken from the chapter “Nymphism” in Ismos): “She paints as if with dressingtable paints, with creams, with lipsticks, and dilutes the paints in the most expensive
essences, and with the softest of powder puffs applies the final touches, fixing what
emerges from this enchanting mixture with atomisers that varnish her pictures as no
varnish does”. Rereading this opening paragraph, I am suddenly reminded of
Baudelaire and his masterful text on Constantin Guys, “the painter of modern life”.
Another high point which unfortunately was not fulfilled: the project of an album
of lithographs with handwritten and also lithographed text, which would have been
entitled París 1917 and printed at a workshop in the Passage du Commerce, and
for which eight artists, Picasso, Juan Gris, Rivera, María Blanchard, Lipchitz, Angelina Beloff, Marevna and Ángel Zárraga, had prepared originals—whatever became
of them?… “This will be an odd book”, wrote Ramón, and certainly it would have
merited a place in the imaginary library of dawning modernity beside La prose du
Transibérien by Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay, Tour Eiffel by Huidobro and
Delaunay, La fin du monde also by Cendrars and Léger, Sports et Divertissements
by Erik Satie and Charles Martin, and certain renderings of Italian Futurism, Russian
and Polish constructivism and Czech poetism.
Ramón-Guillaume Apollinaire. Interviewed by him in Paris in 1917, Apollinaire, a
duplicating-machine copy of whose very rare Case d’armons he acquired thanks to
Marie Laurencin, has all the ingredients, starting with joviality and sense of humour,
needed to fascinate Ramón, who was subsequently to play in Spain a fairly similar
role to the one enjoyed in Paris by the author of Alcools. He actually took this as
something of a joke in the chapter on “Apollinairism” in Ismos: “He is the Spanish
Apollinaire”, he recalls Delaunay saying of him. The similarities lie, above all, in the
way that both tend to translate art into words. Also in their awareness of owing
much to a certain symbolist background, which they continue to cultivate while
others would have us believe they have never been there.
Of the sketches of artists published in the first Pombo, there is one that
draws our attention as it is rather critical: that of the planista Celso Lagar, of
Ciudad Rodrigo, whom he had met in Paris together with the artist’s wife, the
sculptress Hortense Begué. In the eyes of Ramón, Lagar “is not a Cubist as he
claims to be” but “a naughty boy who thinks he can deceive and mock everyone”,
who gives “far-fetched explanations about Art Nouveau stuff”. Later, “an intrepid
and capricious Cubist on the fringes”. The career of this artist from Ciudad
Rodrigo, who painted excellent pictures during that decade, did not evolve very
successfully, and in this regard we ought to credit Ramón with a certain
premonitory skill. (In La sagrada cripta de Pombo, Ramón reproduces “A
fantasy by Celso Lagar on Pombo”).
Ramón-Valéry Larbaud. The meeting between these two great figures in the
Pombo in 1918 was a great moment. The fact that this hispanisant poet and
narrator, who at the time had taken refuge in Alicante and was the author of that
absolutely marvellous and extremely modern Barnabooth, should have noticed his
oeuvre and became its overseas standard bearer, comparing it to that of Proust and
Joyce, was to have many consequences for the French and, by extension, European
destiny of the Madrilenian. It was thanks to Larbaud, for example, that some of
Ramón’s greguerías (“criailleries”) were published in the Dadaist magazine
Littérature.
Ramón-Paul Morand. It seems that the two men had not yet met when Morand
published his fantastic and frequently reproduced calligramme about the Puerta del
Sol in Grecia and in a translation by Cansinos, even though the Frenchman who,
like Ramón, learned a lot from Cubism, was posted to Madrid as a diplomat. The
meeting took place later, in the twenties, a period associated for ever with the
author of Ouvert la nuit and L’homme pressé, two emblematic titles if ever there
were any.
Ramón-Jean Cocteau. They first met in Paris in 1923, at the Delaunays’ studio.
They met again in the second half of the decade in the company of Ortega, Isabel
Dato and Victoria Ocampo. Ramón had already been sensitive to Parade in 1917.
They were united by their interest in Cubism, their love of the circus and drawing.
Alejo Carpentier compared their respective styles in 1925 in a chronicle for Social.
Cocteau continued to be echoed in the following annotation to the Diario
póstumo: “How Cocteau envies the children who play in the garden of the Palais
Royal! But those children have not taken cocaine”.
Ramón-José Gutiérrez Solana. The fact that the writer who, as shown in this
exhibition and catalogue, imported to Spain a good part of the most innovative
European -isms was also a great champion of the painting of the rare José Gutiérrez
Solana, a key name in Spanish art but also a singer in prose, follower of the
footsteps of Darío de Regoyos and Emile Verhaeren, of La España negra,
constitutes indubitable proof of his genius. Solana “has understood and has
painted Madrid as nobody else has, capturing the most acute moment of this city”.
The shared interests of the painter and the author of Elucidario de Madrid gave
rise to another absolute masterpiece, La tertulia de Pombo, the painting which
from 1920 onwards hung in pride of place at the Saturday meetings and which the
leader of those meetings ended up donating to the state, as a result of which it now
hangs in our museum.
Ramón-Barradas. The “great Uruguayan painter”, as Ramón was to call him,
without citing his name, in Nuevas páginas de mi vida, is one of the most regular
Pombians, as we may clearly infer from the second volume on the café, full of notes.
He illustrated three of the writer’s short stories for children, portraying Ramón as a
“watermelon”, in his “carriage” in the café, in a drawing recently incorporated into
the museum collection. However, something—perhaps Barradas’s excessive
closeness to the ultraístas—must have gone awry in this friendship. Otherwise, there
is no explanation for the fact that there are no written references to him in the book
in question or a chapter on vibracionismo in Ismos, which came out so soon after
the painter’s death, or anything but hasty quotes here and there, or an examination
in depth of a universe which, with its cheap bazaars, cardboard toys and cafés, we
imagine to be very close to that of the writer.
And while on the subject of Barradas: Ramón-ultraísmo. Ramón regarded the
ultraístas, who were not included in Ismos—though he was later to rescue them in
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the fifties, in a late article for the Revista Nacional de Cultura of Caracas—to put it
bluntly, as a group of avant-garde social climbers. He said so in “Mi autobiografía”,
the appendix to La sagrada cripta de Pombo, after recalling his own closeness
to Futurism, around 1909-1910: “Therefore when ten years later I saw all this,
which had been on my schedule, I frowned. For me the X-rays and lyrical aeroplanes
had arrived very late. I was ashamed by this delayed and plagiarised act. The
recalcitrant images ten years later were old topics to me. The engine, voltage and
T.S.F. were already sufficiently prominent”. Cansinos-Asséns, present in Prometeo and among the founders of Pombo and in the pages of Pombo, fell from
grace shortly afterwards. However, the ultraístas claimed Ramón for themselves,
especially Guillermo de Torre, “an intelligent and feverish little fellow” according to
Ramón in Pombo. Practically all of them, even those who belonged to Cansinos’s
group at the Colonial and accompanied him to the Viaducto district, frequented
Ramón’s literary circle, as evinced by the founder’s books on the café, which mention Isaac del Vando Villar, Humberto Rivas, José Rivas Panedas, Gerardo Diego,
Alfredo de Villacián, Eliodoro Puche, Ramón Prieto y Romero, Eugenio Montes,
Rogelio Buendía, José de Ciria y Escalante, Evaristo Correa Calderón, César A.
Comet, Francisco and Guillermo Rello, Jaime Ibarra, José María Quiroga Pla, Tomás
Luque, Juan Gutiérrez Gili, Pedro Garfias, Xavier Bóveda, César González-Ruano
and Luis Buñuel, in addition to Borges and his fellow Argentines Francisco Luis
Bernárdez and Oliverio Girondo, Chileans Joaquín Edwards Bello and Teresa
Wilms, Mexican Raúl Carrancá and Peruvian Alberto Hidalgo, and Barradas, Norah
Borges, Wladyslaw Jahl, Marjan Paszkiewicz and Cándido Fernández Mazas of the
painters. In other respects, Ramón was not absent from the ultraístas’ journals and
enjoyed a particularly prominent presence in Ultra and Reflector. Writing in the
weekly Nuevo Mundo several years later, Ramón warmly praised José Rivas
Panedas, who at the time scraped a living as a humble painter of shop and tavern
signs and had once been co-editor together with Garfías of Horizonte, a magazine
to which Ramón also contributed and which he had described in La sagrada
cripta de Pombo, as the work of “a group of coherent and admirable young
people”. And in Ismos, he acknowledges the work of Guillermo de Torre:
“Guillermo de la Torre’s book, Literaturas europeas de vanguardia, is a fine book
with all the trends, written with youth, with justice, mastering everything. It is the
railway guide that should accompany this more monographical book”.
Ramón-Delaunay. Robert and Sonia Delaunay, forced to be Madrilenians during
part of the nineteen-tens and twenties, were very close to Vicente Huidobro—Robert
did a masterful cover for one of the Chilean’s Madrid books, the aforementioned
Tour Eiffel (1918)—and the ultraístas. Sonia appears as “Sofinka Modernuska”, in
Cansinos’s El Movimiento V.P. and as “Lucy” in Rompecabezas, a play by Isaac del
Vando Villar and Luis Mosquera. Guillermo de Torre wrote about Sonia (concerning
her work in the field of decorative arts) in Alfar, and planned to do a book with
Robert. Ramón was a close friend of the couple and a witness to their influence in
the streets of Paris. In addition to various texts, particularly the fragment devoted to
them in La sagrada cripta de Pombo, and the chapter on “Simultanism” in
Ismos, two works from 1923, both housed in the Bibiothèque Nationale in Paris
and which hail from the “platform of novelties”, as he called the artists’ house, bear
witness to this friendship: Ramón’s very calligrammatic “Fan of Words for Sonia
Delaunay” and the sober charcoal portrait he did of Robert.
Ramón-Fernand Léger. Although Léger is one of the few artists discussed in
the book whom he had not met, the chapter of Ismos on “Tubularism”, that is, on
Léger and his “cylindrical world”, seems to us to be one of the most inspired in the
volume. “In Léger’s art all the radiators and all the pipes of the great machine of life
stir”. Of the many intuitions contained in these few pages, the most accurate is
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undoubtedly the one on colour: “In greyish reproductions one cannot appreciate
the beauty of the colour that accompanies these lucubrations and how each thing
stands out with a Harlequinesque sense, in a pleasant morning colouring, of
colours to be breakfasted on”. In other respects, a few of Ramón’s texts also
displayed a “Légerian” tone, such as his Apologie de la linotype, of which Valéry
Larbaud’s French translation is known, published in 51 copies by Franz Hellens a
few months after the Madrid writer’s demise by a Belgian publishing house aptly
named Dynamo.
Ramón-Oliverio Girondo. Of the writer’s most important avant-garde friendships,
mention should be made of the one which bound him to the author, mentioned in
La sagrada cripta de Pombo, of the fabulous book Veinte poemas para ser
leídos en el tranvía, which he reviewed in El Sol. Jorge Schwartz’s book Vanguardia
y cosmopolitismo en la década del veinte: Oliverio Girondo y Oswald de Andrade
studies in depth the ingredients of the Argentine’s cosmopolitanism, which he links
to that of the Brazilian Oswald de Andrade. Ramón and Girondo share many things,
starting with their humour, “suitcase cosmopolitism” (Schwartz) and a taste for
brilliant images. I find particularly interesting the fact that both Ramón and Girondo
are writers and painters—both were included in my exhibition El poeta como artista
at the CAAM in 1995—though on that occasion the differences would have been
more evident than the parallels, for whereas in this field the Madrid writer was
fond of blackness, the Argentinian specialised in joviality, we might almost say in a
“light line”.
In Pombo, in a paragraph preceding the portraits of Diego Rivera, Alfonso
Reyes and other Mexicans: “I love and admire Mexico City. For me, Mexico City is
a terribly dilapidated Madrid, in which buildings like the Ministry of the Treasury, the
Academy of San Fernando, the Hospice and above all the beautiful marine monster,
the Conde Duque Barracks, are repeated fraternally but on a much larger scale and
very dilapidated and corpulent. There are vehement and highly intelligent men, full
of strokes of genius. Besides, Mexico City is the only place where there is perhaps
another Pombo”. Viewed with the perspective that history provides, this statement
appears to be a premonition of the Café de Nadie of the estridentistas, founded in
1922, the figurehead of which was to be the picture with the same title painted by
Ramón Alva de la Canal in 1924—there is also a 1930 version—which in many
respects brings to mind Rivera’s portrait of Ramón.
From the twenties onwards, this was to be Ramón’s Latin American destination.
Earlier, in the La sagrada cripta de Pombo, he referred to “that diaphanous
repercussion I have among the Latin American public and youth”, adding that “their
note of renewal could not be French”. And, as a premonition: “I hope that some day
only Latin America saves me”. Also premonitory were the previous year’s “Paisajes
americanos” (“Latin American Landscapes”) in El alba y otras cosas, where,
among other presentiments, he sings of “El silencio americano” (“The Latin
American Silence” and “Los grandes estuarios” (“The Great Estuaries”)… “We
have not been to Latin America; but a fatal and heartfelt fraternity leads us to think
about its landscapes”. He was to keep in contact with Alberto Hidalgo and Francisco Luis Bernárdez, for whom he wrote prologues. We have discussed Huidobro
and Girondo earlier and, of the ultraístas, Borges, whose Fervor de Buenos Aires
he reviewed in Revista de Occidente, as Larbaud did in Paris. Mention should also
be made of another Peruvian, Alberto Guillén, Miguel Ángel Asturias—to whom, in
an aeroplane interview, he remarked, of the Latin American continent, “I am drawn
to all that, yes, very much so”—and Luis Cardoza y Aragón (for whom he also wrote
a prologue), Germán Cueto and other estridentistas, Jacobo Fijman, the odd
Viscount Lascano-Tegui, and Victoria Ocampo… In 1925 he almost travelled to
Buenos Aires, and the members of Martín Fierro prematurely printed an orange
sheet of welcome with texts by all the group, including Bernárdez, Borges, Macedonio Fernández, Girondo (who also contributed a fantastic drawing) Güiraldes
(Larbaud’s great friend), HIdalgo, the architect Alberto Prebisch… The first real trip
was to take place in 1931. The second in 1933. In 1936, Buenos Aires became
Ramón’s definitive South American destination. (An exception to this fervour was
César Vallejo, who in one of his chronicles from Paris speaks in this connection and
in connection with Paul Valéry and Luigi Pirandello about bourgeois art and
drawing-room sensitivity).
Ramón could have put his name to Rafael Alberti’s poem on cinema. Both in
his Hollywood novel Cinelandia, and in his constant defence of Chaplin’s Little
Tramp—a commonplace of European and American modernity to which he was
to make numerous contributions, the most important being the libretto for
Salvador Bacarisse’s opera Charlot—and desire that his Paris chronicles of
1928 should constitute a “cinematographic review” of the modern city, Ramón
displayed his keen sensitivity to the “seventh art” as it was christened around
that time by Ricciotto Canudo, a key figure in the transition from symbolism to
avant-garde.
When some friends and I began to frequent Lisbon ages ago, O Mundo do Livro
in Barrio Alto was still selling, as part of the library of his friend Joâo de Castro
Osorio, flotsam, prestigious remains of the library Ramón had had there: Girondo,
Huidobro, Cendrars, Pierre Mac Orlan, Picabia, and even a testimony to the
symbolist cycle, Alsonso Quesada’s El lino de los sueños, in a copy dedicated to
Carmen de Burgos… From those years in “El Ventanal”, his home in Estoril—as
usual, a mental space described by Larbaud better than anyone else in “Lettre de
Lisbonne à un groupe d’amis”—are his novel La Quinta de Palmyra, and his
delightful prologue to a re-edition of António Ferro’s Leviana in which he
passionately praises the pavements of the Chiado. We should also mention, some
time later, his acknowledgement in La Gaceta Literaria, always so open to the
Portuguese world, to the multifaceted Almada Negreiros, Madrilenian for a time,
whom he was to cite in the “Picassism” chapter of Ismos. But the discovery of
Portugal, where his aunt Carolina Coronada lived, dates from an earlier period, the
two trips he made to Lisbon during the First World War. It was to give rise to some
of the most inspired pages of “Mi autobiografía” (“My Autobiography”) and
Automoribundia: “There, I found turn-of-the-century sun and air, a backward and
cordial part of the world, far from everything, far from Europe and far from South
America, a hiding place for seagulls”. Particularly pure are the letters from Portugal
to the members of Pombo describing the discovery of a country with which he falls
in love, and from which it is hard to choose a selection, as they constitute one of the
author’s great texts. “I am writing to you having rested in this filtered, optimistic
environment seasoned like a dish of homemade egg custard prepared with delicate
hands. Pure light!” And also: “What is this melancholy that is the nutmeg of this
placidity? I have noticed it in friends, in the pilgrimage of peoples at lucid and happy
times, in the gaze of balconies, in the bottom of the trams. (…) Portugal is the last
stronghold of Europe, and with its great spirit, with its great European conditions,
with its European curiosity, it cannot resist this placid but remote distancing that
gives it the certain appearance of a colony”. And slightly further on: “A crevice of
summer siesta light even in winter”. And: “Beneath no light nor in any environment
does the spirit feel better disposed to meditate, to see, to reconsider the novelistic
and picturesque aspects of life”. And the surprising intuition that one day, in
architecture, there would be a “transatlantic style”. And also, the honour of having
the names of Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Fernando Pessoa appear in print for the
first time in a Spanish publication.
We read in the letters to the Pombo members: “Lisbon is a bit like Rio de Janeiro, a European and more intelligent Rio de Janeiro. Tropical Rio de Janeiro tempered
and sifted”. Regarding his love of Portugal: the Brazilian Ramón, obviously from a
distance, who is feeling the impact of Klaxon, the sensational Sao Paolo journal
close (with reservations) to Futurism and (much more) to L’Esprit Nouveau and
typographically almost Russian, Lissitskian, to which incidentally António Ferro also
contributed. Like Manuel Maples Arce and the estridentistas in Mexico, or Alfredo
Mario Ferreiro some time later in Montevideo with El hombre que se comió un
autobús, Mário de Andrade and his colleagues, of whom the meteoric Luíz Aranha
particularly interests me, declare themselves enthusiasts of the “smell of naphtha”.
In Klaxon the only Spanish presence was, as could not be otherwise, Guilllermo de
Torre. In other respects Ramón, to whom I believe the paintings of Tarsila do Amaral
would have appealed, must have sympathised with a journal that exalted the
automobile—we have only to recall, in El alba y otras cosas, the illustration of
“Cars outside the cinema” and his bittersweet reflections on the garage, which he
imagines in the future to be a “Babel-like and amazing tower”—and also nonsense
talk, cinema and more specifically Chaplin’s Little Tramp (“Carlitos” in Brazil), jazz,
humour, construction…
Italian Ramón, very well described by Rafael Sánchez Mazas in one of his
articles for ABC, a daily for which he was Rome correspondent. After Estoril came
his sojourn in Naples, which inspired his La mujer de ámbar; but there is also his
old turn-of-the century relationship with Marinetti, and his letters to the Pombians
from Florence, and his presence together with Pierre Mac Orlan, another of the
Cubists’ travelling companions, Georg Kaiser, and none other than Joyce himself,
on the editorial board of 900, the international journal of the metaphysical and
follower of Chirico Massimo Bontempelli. (Apropos of Giorgio de Chirico, a
definitive sentence from one of the aforementioned Florentine letters: “Shop
mannequins are of the same race everywhere, a special race of another Europe, the
Europe of wax dolls”).
Ramón, also in Broom. Roman at one time, Broom, for which Léger, Juan Gris,
Prampolini, Man Ray, Lissitsky and many others did covers, and the complete
collection of which is one of the gems of the IVAM’s library, is the most itinerant of
the journals of the international avant-garde.
Ramón-Gecé. It is worth examining this relationship in greater depth. Ramón’s
letters to Ernesto Giménez Caballero, today dispersed, but to whose corpus I was
given access in 1980 by their addressee when I was preparing the exhibition on
Ramón at the Museo Municipal de Madrid, would not be too difficult to bring
together. These letters tell of a truly intense relationship, particularly during the
gestation period of the major project of La Gaceta Literaria. This relationship
continued into the postwar years but reached a high point in 1930, when Ramón
played a part in Giménez Caballero’s film Esencia de verbena, which was both
avant-garde and traditional—a combination he was bound to have liked—and when
a banquet was thrown for the author at Pombo, which, like everything in Spain,
ended in disaster soon afterwards.
Ramón and Spanish prose of the ‘27, from Benjamín Jarnés to Antonio Espina,
from the Canary Islander Agustín Espinosa to Rosa Chacel, through Gecé himself,
the one-man band of the Spanish avant-garde, founder of La Gaceta Literaria,
filmmaker, poster designer—his “literary poster” Fama terráquea de Ramón, based
on the Pombian logo drawn by Rafael Bergamín is amazing—but also a breath of
fresh air for Spanish prose in books such as Julepe de menta and Yo inspector de
alcantarillas.
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In his enthusiasm for Ramón, Agustín Espinosa, who was incidentally also
greatly influenced by Gímenez-Caballero, came to attribute to him in La Rosa de los
Vientos of Tenerife, a journal Ramón had joyfully welcomed, the biography of a boxer
written by … Ramón de la Serna, which he was to describe as one of his best and
most characteristic books. Through this publication the Madrilenian, whom Alonso
Quesada had portrayed some years earlier in the Pombo in one of the scenes of his
Poema truncado de Madrid, enjoyed considerable influence in the Canaries, which
at the time abounded in avant-gardists and which in 1935, spearheaded precisely
by Espinosa, was put on the international Surrealist map.
Ramón-Surrealism. In Ismos, in “Suprarealism”, in addition to including the
fantastic tale of the Kloz family, Ramón praises Dalí—Spanishly so close to Maruja
Mallo and to Giménez Caballero—Miró, whom he describes as a Franciscan painter,
Max Ernst (who, like his friend Adriano del Valle, was also attracted to the art of
collage) and Buñuel, with whom he had motion picture projects. Surrealism is
actually the last -ism of Ramón, a man who was fascinated by Cubism and the esprit
nouveau, but always attracted by dreams and darkness and the absurd—in El libro
nuevo: “Ramón, let us be above all absurd, inexplicably absurd”—and who, as
mentioned previously, anticipated a good part of Breton’s discoveries.
Ramón and Spanish humour of the ‘27, the graphic aspect of which has recently
been studied for this museum by Patricia Molins. Ramón, who is essential to
understanding Jardiel Poncela, Edgar Neville, Tono, Antoniorrobles, Miguel Mihura
and José López Rubio: the first four appear in the books on Pombo. And Ramón’s
influence in shaping the style of the “magic realist” Samuel Ros, the adventure
companion of Alfonso Ponce de León.
Ramón as the subject of humour, of dozens and dozens of caricatures, some
magnificent, definitive: from those of his great friends Bagaría, Salvador Bartolozzi
and Bon, to those of Beberide, through those of Tovar, Sancha, Sirio, César Abín,
Luis Garrán, Antonio de Guezala and Alvaro Cebreiro.
Ramón-Norah Borges. In La sagrada cripta de Pombo we find a sketch of
the café by the painter, then an ultraísta. And a note on Horizonte includes a
reference to “the drawings of that unknown and distant Norah Borges, a strange
spirit full of rooms with balconies overlooking the harbour square where the most
disturbing female friends spend the afternoon with the disturbing Norah, among
curtains and disturbing portraits, and sit in their blouses and, as they are alone,
cross their legs more than ever”. In 1933, he wrote about her in Arte, the magazine
of the SAI. In 1945, he devoted a monograph to her. Through her painting he no
doubt had an inkling of the Argentine capital, as he had had through Fervor de
Buenos Aires. (I spoke to Norah Borges at her Buenos Aires apartment in late
1990 and was surprised that she remembered so many ultraísta verses yet was
scarcely able to tell me anything about their authors, apart from Adriano del Valle
and Guillermo de Torre; she replied: “Young man, you must realise that back then
young ladies did not go to cafés”).
Ramón-Maruja Mallo. In 1942, Losada published a major monograph by Ramón
on another key woman of the Spanish avant-garde, Maruja Mallo, at the time in exile
in Buenos Aires. He had closely followed her work since the end of the twenties,
the period when Ortega y Gasset had shown it—in 1928 to be precise—at the
Revista de Occidente in Gran Vía. Ramón could not fail to like the Galician painter’s
world of open-air dances, her highly personal manner of combining Spanish folk and
‘27-ist sentiment with French, Italian, and German sources gleaned from Franz
Roh’s Magical Realism. Neither could he help liking her rural period in which “the
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paint is entwined in the dry gulfweed, in the agitated and lost wires, in the Spanish
broom with veiled green that grows in the surroundings of the court of the Spains”,
and which reminds him of Solana on account of its colour. The two of them, he in
person and she through reproductions of her works, coincide precisely in Esencia
de verbena.
Ramón-Ángeles Santos. There is a rather cryptic reference to this third female
painter in Automoribundia, where he does not even mention her by name. More
exact details of this episode, in real time, can be found in the relevant article in La
Gaceta Literaria.
Ramón’s essay about chichi, published in Cruz y Raya in 1934: one of the
leading texts on aesthetics published in Europe in the thirties. Two decades earlier,
in one of his letters to the Pombo members from Paris, Ramón had amused himself
by digressing, very much in the manner of Apollinaire, on the painted wallpaper of
his hotel room, and in another written from Florence, he had expounded on “the
victory of chichi in the city of Art”. And he had dreamed of having “a perfectly chichi”
room in his home, together with other rooms. In this essay he ennobles the
“endearingly chichi”, making it a descendant of baroque. “I believe one must return
to chichi because we are witnessing a disenchantment with straight lines, clarity,
forms cut on too obvious surfaces”. By making this statement he appears to be
close to the Dalí who advocated the edible beauty of the style moderne. Of the
examples he provides, together with the chaotic list of objects that was so typical
of him, we find verses by Juan Ramón Jiménez from the modernist and
sensationalist years, by Apollinaire himself… and by Paul Éluard.
Precisely in the Madrid of 1936 Paul Éluard was to be presented by Ramón as
a militantly Surrealist athenaeum member. Following the publication of Éluard’s
letters to Gala we know, from a postcard dated 6 February that year, that the poet
was pleased with these words of our writer, whom he had incidentally criticised
some years earlier in La Révolution Surréaliste for his authorship of one of the
contributions included in the monographic issue on Lautréamont in the Brussels Le
Disque Vert.
Five years before he left Madrid for good, Ismos, the point of departure for this
magazine, had brought together most of the friends and complicities we recall today
in a volume whose cover reproduces Rivera’s Cubist portrait of him. Ismos,
announced years earlier as El Cubismo y todos los ismos, is the swansong of
vanguardist Ramón, who did not go on to discover anything significant thereafter.
The pages of this book, which extols what is “new”—see the often-reproduced
calligramme on page 15—are populated with Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism (Tzara and
his Loosian house with “strange fellows, white-bearded Jews, Germans who outline
elliptic theories, astronomers, women with evening gowns like shining
planetariums”) and Surrealism, some recognisable and others camouflaged
beneath the most motley and sometimes picturesque names. Plus ToulouseLautrec, the forerunner of demotic poster art. Plus a series of seasonal motifs as
Esprit Nouveau (Ramón had described their pavilion at the 1925 Exposition des
Arts Décoratifs and two years earlier had received Ozenfant in Madrid) as they were
“Manifest groc”: African art, jazz, Chaplin’s Little Tramp, the klaxismo of St Paolo,
machines and the New Objectivity photographs depicting them, monsters,
illumination and construction and furniture and modern bibelots à la Hagenauer or,
in this case, in the manner of Tono or Patricio Sánchez… As mentioned earlier, it
leaves out ultraísmo—quoted en passant on page 152, in the chapter “Monstrousism”—and Barrada’s vibracionismo. Also the oeuvre of Juan Gris (which was
nonetheless present in Retratos completos), Francisco Bores, Ramón Acín, José
de Creeft and Germán Cueto, to name only avant-garde artists whom he frequented. And expressionism too, which only mentioned en passant in the chapter
on “Negrismo”: “What the expressionists grow in European city flowerpots are
cuttings of black sculpture”. Also the vast realm, then scarcely perceptible either in
Spain or in Paris, of abstraction, in which Ramón, if truth be known, never showed
particular interest, despite the references to the Soviet concerts of locomotives and
factory sirens in the chapter on “Machinism”, and an early article published in
España in 1922 on Tatlin and his Monument to the Third International. This work is
significantly described in the title as “The new Eiffel Tower”—in the text he also
compares it to that of Babel—and we are familiar with it thanks to Jaime Brihuega,
who included it in the first of his books on Spanish avant-garde. (Years later, concerning the abstract artists, he wrote in Diario póstumo: “Poor painters! They
want to take away all the colour, the drama they want to reflect in their pictures …
Leave them just a flat surface and swings of stripes… Poor painters!)
Posthumous life of Ismos, thanks particularly to the second edition published
by Poseidón in Buenos Aires in 1943: its presence in the delightful Auto-vida by
the Brazilian José Pancetti, and above all, in Spain, its decisive influence in setting
up the artistic and vital project of the then very young and soon to be Surrealist,
Antonio Saura, follower of the Surrealist son of the Kloz family, also a reader of Roh,
future collector of African art, and the person whose idea it was to hold this exhibition, which is naturally dedicated to him.
Outlines of Ramón
Fernando R. Lafuente
It was Juan Ramón Jiménez who characterised Ramón Gómez de la Serna (18881963) by his exact traits of helplessness, joviality, and tragedy: “If at times Ramón
is not quite precise in his marksmanship, it is because his own flushed intoxication
distracts him. He comes and goes from book to café; from theatre to newspaper;
from train to circus; squandering right left and centre […]”
This is true. Ramón’s literary oeuvre—and for various reasons we ought to
include his forays into the plastic arts—is a calibrated sway between luxury and
wastefulness. It is a perfect exercise in confusion structured around the greguería,
a brilliant model into which he translates reality. The greguería, that unconnected
and brilliant combination of humour and metaphor, enables him to blur the
boundaries between genres and translate rhetorical devices into a new text that
seems to encompass everything and project itself on to everything. “Gómez de la
Serna”, wrote Octavio Paz, “carries things to an extreme: his oeuvre is an immense
malleable mass which adopts all forms and gels into none”. And this malleable mass
that Paz defines is the cento of Ramón’s works, the ultimate consequence of which
is, rather than an impertinent classification by genres, the creation of a literary
language—artistic, plastic—scarcely glimpsed previously.
Ramón’s oeuvre is the huge aleph of a world inventory, inexhaustible literary
diversity, astounding plastic richness, an incessant and changeable sense of the
real, a universal atlas, a cosmorama—suggests Saul Yurkievich—a “true Encyclopaedia or Book of all things and many others” (Borges), a germinal cinematographic view of reality through words, a radical metaphor, in short, of someone who
converted everything he touched into art, surrounded by the most curious, brilliant,
nonsensical and motley payroll of artists that any Spanish writer has managed to
enjoy in the twentieth century. Not to mention his enormous influence and renown
in Latin America, where he made a decisive impression on writers like Jorge Luis
Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, the aforementioned Octavio Paz and Gabriel García
Márquez, among others.
During those years, the roaring twenties, Borges’s verdict on Ramón in
Inquisiciones is memorable: “the greatest of the three Ramóns” (we must assume
that the other two are Valle-Inclán and Juan Ramón); the years in which Ortega
compares Ramón to Joyce and Proust, since all three contemplate “magnifying
glass in hand, the microscopic things in life”. Days of wine and roses in which the
early and rare modernity of Madrid inevitably encompassed the tables and fumes,
reveries and anxieties of the Café de Pombo.
Therefore, any approach to the corpus of Ramón’s work requires the caution
that befits a man—Ramón—who cultivated the deadly haze of digression as a fundament of thought, and fragment as a device for sorting reality. Both are absolutely
modern features that shape the contours of what should be understood as Ramón’s
aesthetic geography. The writer himself warned that “it is difficult to draw distinctions in spontaneous exclamation, but that is the purpose of the Essay, with its
many glass tubes for different cultures”. Indeed, Ramón converted any creation,
whether verbal or plastic, into a sort of literary essay.
Herein lies the private world of an author who transforms everything he touched
into literature, into strokes and outlines. His works—and his naive, disconcerting
drawings—display the most radical rhetoric of twentieth-century art: the fragmentary
nature of thought, novel interpretation and ignorance of the itinerary and possible
stopovers. A host of thoughts, heaped together in torrential verbal imagery which, I
must stress, transforms everything it touches into literature and art. Of course the
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constant appeal to fragmentarism, dispersal, and digression have, in more than one
sense, a paradoxical variant, whether in novels, essays, journalistic articles or casual
drawing, all of which raise the model to an ideal genre for expressing the dizziness
and chaos of a society now lacking in powerful referents: “If you wish, reader X”,
Unamuno was to implore, not referring to Ramón but to the new times and new
genres, “to read coherent and transparent and clear and logically connected things
with a beginning, middle and end, and which purport to teach you something, seek
them wherever you will, except here.”
The key to Ramón is the tension, without limits or horizons, between the luxury
of his exquisite and melancholy attempt to trap time through art and the squandering of his torrential and uncontrolled literary oeuvre. Atomisation, if such a thing is
possible, also constitutes the radical finding of his aesthetic intent. Therefore, his
greguerías shatter literary genres and loiter around the strokes of his drawings:
“[…] the most characteristic and frequently studied”, according to Ignacio Soldevila-Durante’s crystal clear explanation of the greguería, “the creation of an
autonomous textual unit consisting of a phrase or small group of phrases, a short
paragraph, concerning a sensorial or sensorialised impression, which is intended to
be creative, telling of reality.”
Each of his works, the smallest feature of the drawings, the brief stroke of a
random outline displays the same recurring elements, with proportions that are
remarkably well administered: liberty, through the profuse and confusing
accumulation of heterogeneous forms; chance, as symbol of a meticulous, unusual
relationship between beings and things; humour, that “ideal link” between the
agonising before and the uncertain afterwards, as a metaphor of the shaping of
contemporary knowledge.
Therefore, Ramón’s oeuvre acquires a full meaning when it is atomised; the
concept of a work as a totality is deconstructed into particles—what are drawings if
not that?—that are superficially unconnected but represent this private realm of a
model for showing and sorting reality. He takes fragments from the real world and
reworks them, taking care to ensure that the jagged edges do not coincide, so that
the reader or spectator cannot find the correlation; that is, what is fractured—what
twentieth-century reality had fractured—is the linearity of the work, the simulation of
totality which, up until those blissful years of the historical avant-garde (19091925), constituted the paradigm of aesthetic experience.
The purpose of the fragments, the breaking of reality into particles, is none other
than to plunge the reader or spectator into a state of confusion. But Ramón’s
lineage has a genealogy: Novalis, Jean Paul, Nietzsche, Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Joyce,
Valéry, Pessoa—who dreamed of writing a Museum of Everything, and was to invite
the reader to order the pages himself—Macedonio Fernández and later Quennau,
Pérec, Cortázar, Monterroso, Serra… the aphorism as a game and palimpsest on
which an aesthetic vision of reality is reconstructed runs through contemporary
literature. Reality is shaped through diversity and the fragment is the most emphatic
expression of simultaneity and contemporary anxieties. Ramón not only
deconstructs pairs of spatial concepts; he also deconstructs simultaneous actions,
making them successive, and vice versa.
Fragmentarism, which seeks to trap reality in a phrase or stroke, is a border
territory for a time of open aesthetic spaces, beneath the mask of uncertainty: the
aesthetic reconstruction of the world; the grasping of reality; accumulation of
unconnected elements like carnivalesque privileges of disguise and mask; the
limit of linguistic and plastic expression; the identification of truth and beauty; the
flight of the entourage and collective assimilation and the vindication of life as
transit and the end of existence; everyone’s, solitary and solidary. He writes in
Ismos: “At first I thought that schools were a complicated and Pythagorean thing;
but I have come to realise they were only a figure, the creative, solitary, personal
figure.”
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The figure which would accompany him on his inner exile to Buenos Aires: “They
accuse ideals of egoism to discredit them, not realising that the most eternally
beneficent deeds of mankind, those which have provided unceasing consolation to
people lost in the street, have been wrought in Ivory Towers.”
Luis Cernuda, who was not precisely a critic to whom praise came easily
(indeed, quite the opposite) was one of the first to note Ramón’s powerful presence
among the Generation of ‘27 and his undisputable hallmark, and the influence of a
number of brilliant metaphors, plus the humour, that made up the phantom
topography of poetic devices hidden behind the simple statement made by the
greguerías:
“All words and expressions die from their correct and literal origin,
“only attaining glory when they are metaphors.”
“Paris will never lose an aerial battle because it has too many chimneys.”
“Rain erases the world.”
“Sleep is a lost property office.”
“Executioners are like cannibals: both kill to eat.”
“The desert is combed with a wind comb; the beach with a water comb.”
The following are some examples, recalled by Cernuda, from the Generation
of ‘27:
“When the light did not yet know / If a boy or girl would be born.” (Rafael Alberti)
“The guitar is a well / with wind instead of water.” (Gerardo Diego)
“Radiator, the nightingale of winter.” (Jorge Guillén)
Ramón is a literary world of his own; everything about him is literature, an art
without genres or limits. José Bergamín wrote in 1928: “Ramón writes badly, just
as Chaplin acts badly—and Josephine Baker dances badly—expressly, expressively;
the motion picture or negrista equivalents are evident, more than in any other
current writer. His literature—or his poetry (apparently anti-literary and antipoetic)
is, more than any other, indicative of a time, perhaps for that reason more passing
than any other. It doesn’t matter. Ramón (like Chaplin’s Little Tramp, an orphan in
his immaculate white desert) always alone, all in all: he is more than enough.”
Does he write badly, draw badly and think badly? He writes and experiences a
boundless, excessive and exemplary work, through an unknown sonority and rhythm
that broaden the variety of language use, the way of looking at things, and renew
the conceptual universe of Spanish literature with its complexes. Therefore Ramón
is the secret genealogy of the Generation of ‘27. He is the discovery, that which
draws attention. As in literature, in his drawings, the type of stroke determines the
shading line. It is not the caricature of Pombo, or discovery for no reason. Ramón
draws as he writes. A clean stroke and conceptual nonsense. It is childish drawing
that conceals a hell. As already stated, Ramón knows no genres; the drawings are
neither figurative nor allegorical, neither descriptive nor sarcastic, but quite the
opposite. The stroke of an errant, a loner who recreates the irony of life with pictures
that are falsely naive pictures and naturally therefore charged with bitterness.
Whereas his books are unclassifiable, his drawings nonetheless share the
labyrinth which has no centre but in this case is orderly. With Ramón, drawing
reveals the dreamlike dimension of the everyday and the world of art, literature, and
life trapped in a circular mirror, with the surfaces facing him. Chance governs
everyday life and art—literary, and perhaps plastic too for Ramón. But a chance
engraved—if such as thing is possible—on cultural tradition. Herein lies his radical
originality with respect to the group of avant-garde artists who first encourage and
subsequently stand back. That is Ramón, he of the Ismos, some would say—as
some do—that that is ramonismo. Maybe.
We have already mentioned Ramón’s essential device, the greguería. Borges
maliciously stated that the problem of Ramón is that he had invented the greguería
and had forgotten how to think. In the drawings Ramón thinks and exhibits his
thought. Ramón saved collages for his life, for his houses in Madrid and Buenos
Aires; an impossible collage. In the drawings the stroke is, if such a thing is possible,
classical, orderly, steady. And that is how it should be because each drawing
contains the deepest of melancholies. If there is a plastic representation of
melancholy—rather like a Chinese ideogram—one must surely be Ramón’s drawings.
Therefore, ‘27 is impossible without Ramón, as is the plastic work of Lorca, Alberti,
Moreno Villa…
Then there are his “pretend biographies” of El Greco, Velázquez, Goya and Gutiérrez Solana, published between 1928 and 1944, a highly curious foray by Ramón
not only into the life of his subjects but into the very conception of the work of art.
And his purpose in the critiques of plastic works is “not to be a critic but a creator”.
But it is in most of the drawings on show at this excellent exhibition where one
perceives this attention focused on a certain pictorial, illustrative style. Nobody can
fail to see that his literary language displays an eminently artistic streak.
In 1922—as Juan Pérez de Ayala recalls—in Variaciones and later in Ramonismo (1923), El circo (1924), Caprichos (1925), Gollerías (1926) and
throughout his whole life in the illustrated greguerías, Ramón incorporated what he
termed “curious illustrations by the author”, which were part of the concept of the
book where they were included. If life resides in detail—and a group of artists, a few,
were aware of this at the beginning of the twentieth century—Ramón drew what is
in things but nobody sees. It is not spirit—a word that was banished during those
years—or aura (religiousness had been superseded by sport); rather, it is an eye that
discloses “the manner in which they are always worse”, but points out the things
nobody sees; or rather, that few see. With Ramón, this intelligence he seeks after
for his readers, that disturbed sensitivity, is lateral to the order of things, it is an
aleph, I should stress, or a kaleidoscope through which to contemplate existence
with sarcasm and melancholy.
It is true that in his forays into plastic art he did not manage—though he did not
attempt to do so—to sketch the contours of the words—powerful, original, different
from ordinary usage—that his books contained. The drawings, like his literature, hail
from a complex lineage, from known genealogies: the orthodox avant-gardism of the
early twentieth century—if we may use what would then have been understood to
be oxymoron—and Pombo’s uproarious and traditional concern with local customs
and manners, which Borges found so objectionable; but also the childlike mimicking
of the dream of reason, the echoes of a fantasy that was boundless yet close to the
pasty ground of reality. And at times all this rolled into a single stroke. As in his
literary oeuvre that is written gushingly, also in the drawings the paths fork, are lost
and meet.
The ingredient that is added to and present in each of his pages and is
perceived in Ramón’s Goyesque nonsensical writings—gollerías—is humour. A
decidedly modern attitude and flair. The humour is Ramón. As Umbral aptly pointed
out, Ramón frequents the entrance and exit of genres with a disconcerting joviality
until he dislocates them all. And Umbral, brilliantly, called them Ramón’s “pretend
genres” because they are works that are constructed in the most complete and
utter aesthetic disorder: “I have taken the liberty of disorder”
This is why humour is the overriding feature of Ramón’s aesthetic gobbledygook, the zenithal expression, the hidden stroke, and why Ramón’s literature finds
its most powerful literary expression in humour.
“Ramón”, writes Cristóbal Serra in his splendid Antología del humor negro
español, a response to the absence of Spaniards from Breton’s Anthology, is above
all a humourist. He ends up treating any work he undertakes humorously. Nobody
has had that privilege of knowing how to deconstruct things in humour as much as
him. This gift gave rise to Ramón’s couplings which are not mixtures and certainly
not tricks. […] In his protean oeuvre, which has plenty of trompe l’oeil, gollería,
capricho, we are never conned […]. Ramón, with his gifts, has caused us to see the
world as he sees it, something the Surrealists aimed for and never achieved […].
Our tiresomely realist and conceptual literature owes a lot to Ramón. Above all it
owes to him the modernity it lacked.”
Ramón’s good humour—which shines through the jovial and melancholic pulse
of his drawings—is sheer black humour, the caustic black that the “other generation
of ‘27”, that of Jardiel and Neville, Solana’s humour in The Burial of the Sardine, was
later to continue with.
“Jovial humour and the blackest melancholy. The most vanguardist literary
gathering in the romantic café. The inventor”, Juan Manuel Bonet describes, “of our
modern prose and the last costumbrista. The longest and the shortest novel.
Endless divagation amid the tobacco smoke and the flashes of lightning of very
short greguerías.”
His humour is constructed like a metaphysical and melancholic aleph. Jardiel
admitted that: “Were it not for Ramón Gómez de la Serna, many of us would be
nobodies […]. What the public”, Jardiel was to stress years later upon recalling the
premiere and huge scandal of Los medio seres in 1929, “was unable to digest
then was handed to them by us them already masticated and they accepted it
without even batting an eyelid.”
And López Rubio, who coined the term “the other Generation of ‘27”, remembers him in a certain light: “[…] it was enough for Ramón to suggest to us
possible untrodden paths and each took the one that best served his purposes.”
The same applies to the Argentines Macedonio Fernández and his follower,
Jorge Luis Borges. Ramón’s humour bears little relation to non sense; Ramón’s is
plastic, similar to the cinematographic humour of Buster Keaton as opposed to the
circus-like excess of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. Humour, yes, but also commotion,
emotion: “My humour is a humour that rests on things or converts people into
things, a humour in which I have taken refuge having seen that beings are machines
of ambition and betrayal.”
Metaphor is the essential element of Ramón’s humorous poetics; this could not
be otherwise. Back then, metaphor had become the rhetorical device around which
all avant-garde creation revolved. Metaphor in poetry, in prose, in motion pictures,
in artistic fragments. The whole secret of Ramón’s (humorous) use of metaphor lies
in his facet of inveterate collector of images: “Humour is an attitude to life, a means
of understanding, of not vanishing too much, of unbosoming one’s sensitivity
instead of just keeping it inside.”
An action that reveals and unveils encounters, dictated by chance, of things
around us that we usually look at without seeing. To capture through words, through
image, and say it and paint it and outline it. Ramón affords prose agility—that fine
stroke of his gollerías, of his drawings on an ephemeral piece of paper—in his
inventiveness regarding the unspeakable; he affords it greater agility in the fictitious
grammar of comparisons and metaphors. Agility of expression, density of concept,
a new reality shaped from strokes, from words. Ramón’s aesthetic significance lies
in his ability to make a literary text, a pictorial outline, a constant flow of images.
Ramón’s models and artistic artifice are essentially visual. Defining the nuance. An
image that retrieves the tininess of the common man, an image that reveals the
unusual in the everyday …
Ramón’s humour is governed by total disagreement with the traditional Spanish
attitude to death. He was to recommend with a certain veiled intent that one should
not abhor it, or even blame creation as if for an evil. Meditate about death, by all
means, but meditation should not be without a pinch of joy, of ease. Cheerful
meditation—if oxymoron may be used—that feels the urgent desire to convey to us
the emotion of a last discovery vis-à-vis the uncertain astonishment of things.
What lies behind this? Only circus-like gesture? A witty remark? Ramón, hidden
behind the strokes of his drawings, in the imaginary calligraphy of his pages, reflects
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profoundly on contemporary man. And what Ramón does is translate those uncertainties and those melancholies, those anxieties and those yearnings into
Spanish literary and artistic tradition. Modernity visits Madrid’s Rastro.
Contemporary man has taken himself too seriously but lives on the margin of
creation. The encounter, by no means fortuitous, of a writer like Ramón with this
intellectual environment—governed by the decline of the writer as a new god—leads
him inexorably to adopt an attitude of cheerful despair, of slow and jocular suicide.
One must have fun. The twentieth century, beset by disasters, is the century of
speed and sport. One must have fun and turn one’s spirit and attention away from
a destructive reality. The orders multiply: fun and dehumanisation. These drawings,
the thousands of pages reveal the most dramatic conflict of an artist: a lone and
inert writer’s battle to avoid being left on the sidelines of life, to penetrate life, to
come to life, in short, to be: “The Spanish novelist Gómez de la Serna”, wrote Walter
Benjamin about El circo in the Amsterdam Internationale Revue, “has published a
book of annotations on the circus which not only constitutes a documentary
testimony of this renewed interest but explains very well how such an interest has
arisen from the precarious situation of the masses, from their diminished fear of
death, from their growing scepticism towards times of spiritualisation and brutalisation.”
His works therefore form remnants of another age that remain in an imaginary
territory in which literature, art and confession are mingled in a labyrinth with no
centre. The conjuror’s coat stand and the worn carpet of the circus, the stage
scenery of a dream world that scarcely distinguishes the shading line drawn
between sleep and wakefulness. His obsession with death, his love of dead things,
the world of Madrid’s Rastro—where things no longer used for the purpose for
which they were created are piled up—add to his oeuvre a dimension that is a far
cry from mere humour: “The most insignificant things […] can appear beautiful to
us”, Schopenhauer had stated, “each thing has its own beauty; not only organic
beings […] but also the inorganic, the amorphous and even industrial products.”
Furthermore, as with fragments, Ramón’s genealogy with respect to humour is
more inferred than known. His contemporaries and forebears are names like Max
Jacob, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Renard, Jarry, Macedonio Fernández—incidentally, most of them excellent draughtsmen: “Carroll, before Ramón, had achieved his
destiny through syllogism, which led him to the absurd. Lear, his travelling
companion, was to create a Book of Nonsense that is dazzling even today. J.
Renard, looking out of the corner of his eye like Ramón, was to take by surprise the
other life of things and beings, the small secret they keep, their convulsed beauty,
as Breton was to say […]. If there is a liberating view of utilitarian things it is
Ramón’s. It comes as no surprise that Ramón’s art should have found a fervent
admirer in Macedonio Fernández, the Argentine Quevedo, who always yearned to
be what Ramón was”, recalls Cristóbal Serra. “Los muertos, las muertas y otras
fantasmagorías, Automoribundia and Nuevas páginas de mi vida, disprove
the merely playful Ramón, showing this other Ramón who is closer to mystic
experience and biblical haze. Close to Father Granada in Introducción al Símbolo
de la Fe o La Oración y la Consideración.”
Ramón plays cheerfully with death: “In life one is a reveller of death.”
“One’s ideas should be undone and softened so that they return to
“the undone chaos, the tranquilising chaos.”
His bursts of humour are constant: “The skull is the image of death but actually
it is no more than proof of the innumerable pottery of life.”
“What suits a skull best is a bowler hat.”
“After the dressing room comes the skeleton closet.”
“The absurd cannot be stupid, or cunning, or wicked.”
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It is true; the secret territory which Ramón’s extraordinary oeuvre reflects in
watermarks embraces happiness and death, luxury and wastefulness. A chronicler
of life, of the dreamed-of life, chronicler of the circus—”my true profession”—in the
ring of time he takes on the deceitfully cheerful appearance of death; chronicler of
cemeteries (“there is nothing that awakens one more than living above death”), his
obsession with death enables him to sketch an inner oeuvre, a carnivalesque dance
prompted by his inner laughter, so close to Cervantes’s humour in its melancholic
and cautious irony.
Often, wary of his own recommendation (“in life you have to be a bit silly
because if not only others are and they don’t leave you anything”), Ramón forgets
his transcendence and his circumstance and tosses about playful euphoric pills
with the sole intention, for which we must be thankful, of making us laugh; however,
what his work conveys, here there and everywhere, is not uproar but discovery; not
roars of laughter, but a gently melancholic gaze; not clownery but unease. Humour
“is the yellow corpuscle of the circulation”
Convulsed parody, the aesthetic of the object that becomes another when it
loses its reference and its purpose; art that roams the streets and seeps through
the gaps in memory, the disguise and the mask that drink up the last glass of
shadows: “The writer […] a martyr who offers others the intoxication of his
inventions, but when he seeks the glass to drink from too he does not find it,
because the glass he offered others was his own cranium .”
And, in the middle, one of the most dazzling creators of twentieth century Spain
with a sole virtue: “Ramón’s great virtue”, wrote Nigel Dennis, “is finding himself in
a particular place and time, surrounded by people or by objects and, always with
pen in hand, transcending it all.”
As with the monumental edition of his Obras Completas, thanks to the keen
interest and knowledge of its editor Iovana Zlotescu, this exhibition will hopefully
also help restore Ramón to the prominent place that twentieth-century Spanish
culture and culture in Spanish still, shamefully, deny him.
Ramón’s -isms
Ioana Zlotescu
Litany for a confession and heartrending for his faithful readers—such are the pages,
telling of one of so many other sad episodes evoked in Automoribundia, which
bear witness to the enormous generosity Ramón displayed when, despite the
poverty that surrounded him in Buenos Aires, he decided to donate the painting, the
phantasmagoric painting by Solana of the friends sitting around the marble table in
the Café de Pombo, to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid: “The painting
should remain in Spain, as the landmark of an era, of our era, of my era […] I have
a duty […] to my friends of today and to my friends of the future and I know that
young Spaniards, whose adolescence is always literary, will one day be thankful to
see again those wax dolls in the picture, who tomorrow would be only dramatic and
confidential characters of another period […] it provided a protective shade […] to
a generation that could have been the generation of Spain […] that painting is our
flag of permanence” in “permanent enclosure, in the heart of my Madrid, fulfilling my
dream of spending the night in a museum.” 1
Years earlier, in 1931, Ramón published Ismos, the first step in his farewell to
an era, a bittersweet ending to “his era”. Back then his farewell, which was so
recent, had not yet turned into nostalgia. Ramón had assimilated it with a certain
optimism, in a new daydream he called “porvenirismo”. Indeed, shortly afterwards
he invented “sinsombrerism” (“hatlessism”) as a new rebellious gesture towards
political and social cynicism.
When he wrote Ismos, the author once again demonstrated his acute sense of
the “air of the era” and his permanent state of listening and awaiting the reality that
underlies appearances.
The end of the road, the demise of the roaring twenties was publicly confirmed
in Spain when on 1 July 1930 La Gaceta Literaria announced to all and sundry its
famous “sensational survey” on the key question “What is avant-garde?” This was
in turn broken down into a further four questions, in which verb tenses that
fluctuated between present and past clearly insinuated that the topicality of the
subject of the survey was questionable. The diagnosis was generally negative;
Salazar y Chapela, among others, replied categorically: “The avant-garde existed,
delighted and died”, while Benjamín Jarnés regarded its existence as a part of what
was “a particular moment in the history of Spanish letters”. But Ramón, loyal as ever
to his ideas, refused to “pass judgement on such a beautiful word that signifies a
frontward adventure”, “an exceedingly upright word”, ending the interview with
enthusiastic praise: “lastly, I have to utter a heartfelt viva that deserves indisputable
words. Long live the avant-garde! Long live avant-gardism!”
The idea of bringing together in a book some of his direct and sincere
testimonies of the short-lived career of the avant-garde may have arisen from the
lucid awareness of its extinction, from the wish to make amends for it. The key to
this hypothesis lies in the adamant declaration in the “Prologue”: “we are moving
out of a period and must explain our era we are leaving behind”.
But the writer had reasons for not being overly optimistic about the advent of the
new decade. Indeed, 1929 brought his first major upsets, some related to the
overall change of mentality. Destiny made him a direct participant in the maelstrom
of the grand finale, after having been fully a part of it during the indelible years of his
Paris heyday.
First he experienced the failure of Los medios seres, a hybrid play that was
neither avant-garde nor traditionalist. He reacted with integrity, once again finding
consolation in his humour, which enabled him to see clearly the deceitful and dual
reality of life, so absurd. Around the same time his relationship with Carmen de
Burgos broke up owing to the rather sordid and unmentionable affair he had had
with her daughter during the rehearsals of the ill-fated work.
Lastly, to cap it all, in his rather cowardly “flight” to Paris in shame, it fell to
Ramón to experience disillusionment with a subtle change that was hovering in the
air of the formerly privileged city, the essence of the modern city. Nothing was
longer the same as in 1923 when, guided by Valéry Larbaud, he conquered Paris
for the first time, or as in 1928, when Ramón was quoted by Corpus Barga as being
“today’s most universal Spaniard”. The stimulating encounters with the great names
of the -isms of the immediate past were being replaced by invitations from wealthy
people, “masters who wished to be amused by their servants.” 2 Suddenly, he found
himself face to face with a mankind he had hitherto shunned, although lurking
beneath his personal anarchism expressed in the article “Mis siete palabras” (“My
Seven Words”), published in Prometeo, and even in his more recent novels, was an
underlying dislike of the “bourgeois” and their conventionalisms—an attitude that
was typical of avant-garde art and literature. In Automoribundia, Ramón, a prolific
coiner of “isms”, for want of a more vivacious expression, invented the derogatory
“criadismo” (“servantism”), going on to state: “I realised that the era of great
solidarities was over” and, returning to an expression coined in January 1931 in an
article published in La Gaceta Literaria, stated adamantly that Paris had become a
“tentacular city.” 3
In view of the waning avant-garde, Ramón opted for a change of direction which
basically consisting in finding new sources of inspiration. In 1930, from his cold
Paris hotel room, he began to write La nardo, a Madrid novel that was very far
removed from, and had turned its back on, the urban world of the avant-garde. In
1931, as if to spark a face to face debate, he published two books with highly
significant titles as to their connotations of the end of one path and the beginning
of another: Ismos and Elucidario de Madrid. On the one hand, he took a look at
the high moments of days gone by and, on the other, threw himself wholeheartedly
into conveying the eternity which thenceforward was to prevail in his literature.
Once again, these works clearly displayed the writer’s characteristic bipolarity, his
continual sway between inwards and outwards. While Elucidario de Madrid
represents a personal view of the joyful solitary stroller through the Madrid of always
and forever that Ramón had been, Ismos explains the countless and varied
“contortions” performed in Paris, the open metropolis. However, this does not mean
to say that in Ismos the writer does not often stray from the horizontal plane of
superficial description. This occurs when he shares with us his personal experiences of the adventures of the new trends described in the book and, once again,
he proves unable to resist the constant temptation to be autobiographical. He
combines movement through the city and its streets, paying attention to the
gestures of the fast-moving beings who populate it, with the secrets that spontaneously arise from the inner spaces and, ever willing to share memories, often
addresses us in the first person. Ismos, a work that falls halfway between essay
and portraiture, presents to the reader the furiously-paced life of the avant-garde
through their witness and travelling companion, Ramón.
Of Ramón’s urban landscape that fluctuates between real and imaginary, Paris,
the city of all the -isms, is the one Ramón views most realistically. When the writer
takes delight in making it shine against a modern backdrop, the capital of cosmopolitanism becomes palpable, visible, sniffable and concrete; it no longer incites
him, as it used to in his early trips back in the 1910s, to launch into transforming,
intimate and secret formulations. The description of modern Paris is a far cry from
the earlier days when, enveloped by the city, he nonetheless look little notice of it,
paying attention only to his own metamorphoses, with the supreme joy of
someone who wishes to find himself, in silence and solitude, immersed in the
“delirium” of writing El libro mudo. In contrast, the announcement in Pombo of
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the forthcoming publication of París 1917, in a multifarious and by no means
solitary collaboration with Picasso, Juan Gris, Lipchitz and Rivera, among others, is
a clear sign of how his range had adapted to the maelstrom of the physiognomy of
“new” trends.4
For the writer, the new creators and Paris, a vital meeting point, constitute a
whole in Ismos, irrespective of the (rather disparate) dates when they served as
points of departure for its different chapters. Despite dwelling—formally, at least—on
specific names, Ramón longs to present the reader not so much with a closed
examination of each of them but rather with an observation of the relationships
between them, which incidentally is a very modern approach. In his memories—for,
although recent, they were by then memories—the whole city throbs as if it were
organic and its artistic and urban facets are inseparable, a miracle rescued from the
haze of what it no longer is. An accomplice of the varied “-isms” and their
representatives encompassed by the book, Ramón immerses himself fully in the
contemporary mental landscape, replacing the objective and distant witness with a
subjective man, thereby—as Matoré put it—achieving a “relativist perspective”. Even
at the risk of losing himself.
Ismos progressively developed in successive articles in different newspapers,
including the magazine Prometeo. While the adventure of the stories that make up
the book begins in 1909-1910 with the publication of articles by Ramón and
Marinetti in Prometeo, it was to end in 1930 in Revista de Occidente. Ramón’s
piracy of his own texts is unceasing—a factor which makes the researcher’s task
enormously difficult—but the game can be amusing and leads to the discovery of
articles on “-isms” that are not included in the book and were thoughtfully invented
by Ramón in La Tribuna, El Sol, Nuevo Mundo…
The dates on which the chapters of the book were written are uncertain. The
author draws from here and there taking snippets of articles or articles that are
slightly changed, shortened, lengthened and rewritten in such a way that, as in other
books of his, any reader familiar with the usual pilgrimmage of texts in Ramón’s
oeuvre knows that 1931, the date Ismos was published, is a mere formalism, or
rather, the year of harvest. In view of the jumble of loose texts reproduced partially or
totally, it is worth leaving aside investigative accuracy as to the real date each chapter
was written and allow ourselves to be seduced by the book’s unity of concept.
If we consider all the information accumulated today, after many debates on the
avant-garde literary manifestos and after so many major exhibitions on the leading
figures of the avant-garde, Ismos is not a novelty. Everything has already been said;
the avant-garde is history and that is why it is called historical. But the relevance
of Ismos, now and always, stems from the author’s personal view, from his involvement and determination to extract the essence of his point of view, subjectively
and from all possible and necessary angles.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna could afford to present his era however he wished,
that is, without a pre-established order, without precepts, with the full freedom of
subjectivity. One of the keys to the book and its structure is that he knew, he
certainly knew, that he belonged to a breed of precursors, of founders. Those who
are familiar with his work will immediately recall the opinions categorically expressed
in “El concepto de la nueva literatura” (“The Concept of New Literature”) in 1909
and “Mis siete palabras. Pastoral” (“My Seven Words. Pastoral”) in 1910 and
repeated in all the writings of his youth, about the creation of a “personal”, subjective
work of art capable of shedding the “disguised reality” of the past and of shying
away from the excessive ornamentation of the modernists. In the first of the
aforementioned texts, Ramón states that “The first influence of literature is life,
today’s life unveiled, short, categorical as never before, beneath an unprecedented invasion of light. From this copulation performed with a primitivism that has
taken many centuries to liberate itself […] springs its growth.” 5 In the second he
expresses his permanent obsession with not being able to break through the
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opacity of established ideas; “Oh, if the impossibility of undoing should come!…”;
“Dream of Robinson Crusoe! / Childhood dream that transports me again now!…/
Fantastic dream of being a Robinson Crusoe!” 6
In 1924 the writer, by then possessing an extensive and dense literary
experience, saddened by the silence that was enveloping his “missionary impulse”
of the “new” trends in Spanish literature, and also rather hurt by all the fuss made
of Huidobro when he visited Madrid, does justice to himself in La sagrada cripta
de Pombo, in the section proudly entitled “My inventions and anticipations”: “I had
the presence of mind over fifteen years ago to see what the style of the future was
and how far image would progress […]. I was not impressed with everything with
the disloyalty of memory but rather in order to find a meaning. I felt the period with
that sincere desire […]”; further down he refers to himself as the pioneer of
creacionismo and therefore, also implicitly, of ultraísmo, through El libro mudo and
Tapices. He recalls his strange greguería: “What a handsome lizard awaits my
silence on my navel to bask in the sun!” and ends with a categorical statement,
likening himself to the rebellious facet of Futurism: “I was the first to throw a stone
at the moon […].” 7
The first chapter of Ismos is devoted, with the honours due to a precursor, to
Apollinaire; Ramón warns that if he mentions him it is “because it is appropriate to
do so, not because I have been his follower […]”. He does not conceal his pride
when he recalls that Delaunay considered him to be the “Spanish Apollinaire”, going
on to state that: “In a way we turned out to be twins who had never been in the
same womb. (Later the same thing happened with Max Jacob, who will always be
for me the unknown mussel)”.
One of the many other ties that united Apollinaire and Ramón was the
shrewdness of being able to intuit what was genuine in a world abundant in novelty
and conmen.
This was Picasso. Ramón echoes Apollinaire in the “Acto epilogal” of the
chapter on the painter, stating with the forcefulness of someone who knows what
he is talking about that: “At all stages of the new art Apollinaire’s axiom is
repeated advocating that one should not seek in imitation what one wishes to
create […]”.
Frequent reference has been made to the parallels between Picasso’s and
Ramón’s art and in this connection we may recall the contemporary of the two,
Guillermo de Torre. Therefore, to speak of their common sponteneity or huge ability
to invent and switch to a different range is by no means new. What is interesting is
Ramón’s point of view and what it conveys, that is the likening of his own
characteristics to those of the person portrayed. To Ramón Picasso is more than
Picasso: he is “picassismo”, just as Ramón reflected in his art is not just Ramón but
“ramonismo”.
Before critics spoke of ramonismo as a style, Ramón collected brief novel texts
of his in avant-garde magazines, subsequently or formerly called caprichos or
gollerías, greguerías or fantasmagorías, etc. under the proudly generic title of
“ramonismo”, which in 1923 became a book title. Ramón measured his strength
only against Goya, when from his first articles he conveyed the underlying message
of the shared solitude of the creator.
In the very personal analyses to which the author subjects his guests,
“ramonismo” shines through powerfully—as could only be the case—as the host of
them all, having no qualms about conducting the debate, guided by the thread of
hilarity that links image and object.
According to the author of La sagrada cripta de Pombo the aesthetic of
“ramonismo” was non-existent. This unwillingness—and surely inability, because it
was not his job—to disclose with the same force as in his artistic expression the
ultimate “secret” of personal creation is another significant factor he shared with
“picassismo”: both artists choose to let their oeuvre speak for itself.
“Ramonismo” lacks the typical manifestoes that are tinged with the dogmatism
of schools. The aforementioned texts of Prometeo or the “Pombian commandments”
and the famous “proclamations”, among many other writings, have very little in
common with avant-garde norms and recipes. They are merely expressions of a
heightened personalism that stems from the author’s most private convictions as
regards attitude to life and an important part thereof, which is literature. He denies
that the Pombians make up “a literary group with their particular aesthetic […]. Our
aesthetic is ‘Pombian’. We are the ‘Pombians’. Nothing more.” 8 Much earlier, in
Tristán. (Propaganda al libro Tapices), he had stated: “the rest of my oeuvre
[…] will be only successive, increasingly forgetful of its disordering principle so that
any questions on its aesthetic and moral will be impossible and unintelligible.” 9 In
Ramonismo (1923) he states without further explanation: “This book shows my
spirit with decisive pen strokes. In it I have attempted to give powerful expression
to things in order to set my -ism against all the -isms.” 10
In La sagrada cripta de Pombo he confesses he is “naive […] but with no
catch” and states that a fundamental feature of his aesthetic is not to have mixed
“anything else with this and to have rejected any imitations.” 11 In common with the
“new spirit” he does not relinquish the tradition of the past. For example, in pages
432-433 of the aforementioned book, he states that the “new man” is based “on
the radiant security that indigenous reality deserves”. And in 1929, in an article
entitled “La contraexposición” (“Counter-exhibition”) from the “Horario” series
published in El Sol, on 31 March, he again stresses that his aspiration to what is
“new” in no way concerns his attachment to true tradition, and that he is thus “one
of the few people who respect both hemispheres of art and are moved […] by
Giotto and by Picasso, and are accordingly […] doubly victims of the stones thrown
by the fanatics of each group”. In this connection we should recall his praise of race
in the lecture “South of the Spanish sculptural Renaissance.” 12 in Prometeo, his
fervent defence of the “upright young people” who go to the Rastro “to freely show
off their old, modern and future soul,” 13 and the Portraits and Biographies he wrote
on so many classics.
He allows “barroquismo” as an ingredient provided that “human, mundane,
solitary, isolated, contradictory, enormous, fugitive, faced…” elements are added.
The inexhaustible “ramonismo” bore, and continued to bear, up to the very last page
written by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, albeit in darker shades—of “macabre
humour” as he said in Automoribundia—an unmistakable hallmark. Unusual in his
sources, modes of expression and ability to find totally surprising similarities
between everything that exists in the universe, he focused his attention on lighthearted, tiny things, without any hierarchical concern in his depiction of reality.
“Ramonismo”, supreme realism transformed in a constant sway between life and
death, circus and cemetery, had reached its zenith. Unequalled, it had spilled over
powerfully and brilliantly into a hitherto unseen dispersal of literature in liberty,
without boundaries between genres, or indeed even between his specific books, so
disordered, atypical, out of control, new, in order to show that everything is “whimsical” and chance.
Ismos belongs to the books with a ramonista structure, motley and open to an
endless number of possible additions. It is ramonista in the jumble of unspecified
dates, in the writing of each chapter and also in the hotchpotch of texts, portraits,
sketches of objects, inventions of homemade “-isms”, etc. that make it up. In the
Obras Completas currently being edited (Círculo de Lectores/Galaxia
Gutenberg) we have incorporated Ismos (not yet edited) into the “literary part” of
“Portraits and Biographies”, since what the book represents, despite the foregoing,
is not disorder but the writer’s hopes of leaving a testimony of affinity and complicity
with the people and things he portrayed.
The closest of Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s friends was Diego Rivera, his
earliest accomplice in the adventure of new art. It is strange that in “Riverismo”, the
author only refers fleetingly to the exhibition Los pintores íntegros staged in Madrid
in 1915, where beside Rivera’s Cubist painting of Ramón hung works by María
Gutiérrez Blanchard, Agustín “el Choco” and Bagaría. The exhibition was described
as “an amateurish effort!”.
When Ramón speaks of the painter—and this was not the first time, as there are
a considerable number of other articles written earlier than “riverismo”—the writer at
the same time pours out the secret cravings of his own art: desire to achieve the
“untransferable cypher” in everything he gleans from life. Like the Cubist “novorretratismo” of which Rivera was a supreme example (Ramón previously referred to
him as “el integérrimo”) in the portrait he painted of Ramón, shunning any “false
similarity”, so in “the man of letters”, “a coarse and inexplicable [sensation] in the
vulgar spectator […] amounts to a breakdown into different and changing words
and becomes slow and deciphering, lengthening and developing the concept”. The
breakdown of reality must be “wise, fecund, disembowelled and authentic”, in order
to achieve the “rotation” of the portrait in question, that is, to see it from all angles.
In other words, a breakdown unfettered by habit. Like painting, literature—I quote
from a fragment of “Novelismo”—has to know that “Reality needs to be liberated in
phantasmagoria, affording a higher meaning to what occurs and pointing out its
new forms”, because “reality requires a mould and shelter”.
In contrast, Ramón’s Futurism does not grant him the title of “marinettismo”. This
is simply because he had already realised, from his beginnings in 1909 and, as
always, rightly, that Futurism was little more than “a quick dusting of the earth”. Its
exacerbated concern with mechanics, lack of “mammal”, vital, “organic” words and
its contempt for women made Futurism merely “a manly and erect thing”. Ramón
was to display his disagreement with Futurism in several articles written during the
twenties, although, as in Ismos, he never once disowned his friend Marinetti. But,
how harsh he is in the chapter entitled “Futurism!” He states that: “Everything is
unacceptable and false in this religion, for Marinetti even came to say that motorcycles are divine!”.
The pages of this chapter are full of noise, onomatopoeia and shouting. This is
what there is in Futurism: the dance of the machine gun, incitement to war, scorn for
Ramón’s dearly loved Ruskin. Nothing else. The author of Ismos attenuates the
dryness, that is, the lack of true life of Futurist manifestations, bringing on to the
scene Bernadette, Marinetti’s beautiful wife, as evident proof of how ridiculous his
earlier chauvinistic attitude was. Ramón’s own -ism, “ramonismo”, stops when he
comes across the redundant emptiness of Futurism and no longer engages in that
peculiar movement of his of rotating continually around what he describes, with his
characteristic circles increasingly laden with accumulated truth.
But, as I stated earlier, Ismos is not merely a portrait gallery; it is also a sign of
the modern city enveloped in new settings, immersed in new sounds and smells, all
of which give fresh impetus to the arts. The modern city is also a wild jungle of
instincts, where deadly arrows are replaced by street hazards, caught up in the wild
rhythm of jazz and where the inhabitants are in perpetual movement, in a simultaneous and crowded instantaneousness, amid the horns and fumes given off by
the fast cars.
In many articles written before Ismos from the “Marginalia” series in Nuevo
Mundo in the twenties and “Desde París” in El Sol in the early 1930s, Ramón
comments on the particular “signs” of the city which are superimposed on those of
life, creating a confusion that generates unreality and ambiguity, in an interaction
that involves both animate and inanimate. For example, the “new mannequins”,
“shop-window grotesques” and hoardings directly influence the inhabitants of the
new cities, whose “new beings” hesitate, lost in this no man’s land, about to
become beings of the new “snobistic” fiction, because “Shop window imitation is
invading life, foreshortening it in a different way”, causing these beings “a moment,
between the unreal realm of the automobile and that of life, to stretch and grow
471
longer with a new gesture, a gesture taken from recently invented beings” (Nuevo
Mundo, 16 March 1928).
In this spirit of the new fast pace the author approaches the chapters on
“Simultanism” and “Estantifermismo”, influenced by the Delaunays who, as “true
precursors”, live in “a Futurist projection”. In the article entitled “Los Delaunay”
published in La Tribuna in January 1921, Ramón confesses he has “for a long time
been peering out, leaning on the ledge of the windows painted by Delaunay, and
am familiar with the landscape that can be scanned from these brilliant pictures, for
which Apollinaire wrote an admirable poem”.
Before Ismos, we hear about Sonia Delaunay in the article “Los trajes poemáticos” published on 1 December 1922 in Nuevo Mundo, when she sent the magazine a drawing of the design of the suit “Ángel which has slipped its hand inside
the fruit basket”, called “Poema de Tzara”. In the article, partly taken up again in
“Simultanism” (without drawings), Ramón confesses he finds it difficult to compose
a poem for the dress she is to wear to the Pombo and proposes as a solution only
evoking words such as “fan”, “diaphanous”, ”ambrosia”, etc., which he rarely uses,
as opposed to others that are much more abrupt, less lyrical, closer to the avantgarde. Perhaps having resorted to these rarely used words conceals a sentimental
nostalgia that is banished from his avant-gardist declarations and has its roots in the
remote and similar “Palabras en la rueca” from the magazine Prometeo. He
continues to tell the story of the “fan of words” and curiously does not tell us that a
year later it will be included in the programme of the “Grand Bal des artistes de
Paris. Au profit de la Caisse de Secours Mutuel de l’Union de Artistes Russes”, held
on 23 February 1923 convened by Auric, Diagilev, Delaunay, Gris, Marinetti,
Matisse, Picabia, Rubinstein, Stravinsky, Tzara, Huidobro, Mayakovsky…
Immersed in the memory of the Delaunays, Ramón recalls himself in the bustle
of the Parisian nights in the “poets’ booth” they imagined, where “Everything
gleamed”, surrounded by jazz and extravagant sets—works by artists driven mad by
novelty—or in their parlour, beside Cocteau or Chagall, he recalls his strolls amid the
works of the Delaunays exhibited on hoardings and in shop windows, and the
animated conversations about a dreamt-of modern city both artists yearned for, with
glass and nickel houses, so that an all-embracing “vital simultanism” could attain its
maximum potential. The sight of these projects, the result of a paroxysm of
modernity, causes the real city of Paris suddenly to appear to him to be sad, opaque
and bourgeois.
The chapter “Estantifermismo” was previously published by Ramón with the title
“Los muebles nuevos” (“The New Furniture”) in the Marginalia series from 1928, in
Nuevo Mundo, which also included, on different dates, “New Lamps”, “New
Terraces”, “Aeroplanism”, “The Negroid”, “New Hammocks”, “New Beings”, etc. In all
of them the author points out that the “contemplation of delirious modern life” in the
street but also in the new interior decoration, dominated by furniture in “uneven
attitudes” simplified to such an extreme that it has become merely shelves, could
lead the “new beings” to be infected, becoming estantífermos (“shelf-sick”), while
Ramón acknowledges that he himself is rather “estantirreformado” (“shelfreformed”). This argument is in keeping with Ramón’s constant obsession with
finding a psychoanalytical interpretation of life—for which he proudly regarded
himself as a forerunner of Freud—expressed categorically years later in “Las cosas
y ‘el ello”(1936) (“Things and the ‘Id”): “Including in psychoanalysis things with
broad connotations amounts to finding the secret to what so often stifles man, the
cause of disease that twenty specialists were unable to find and which a dentist
finds in a tooth. Everything external climbs up the inside […] in the depths of the
subconscious, in ‘the id’.”
We should recall that in the decade leading up to Ismos, Ramón’s novels
show a constant concern with these interrelations between people, things and
the home or nature environment: El chalet de las rosas and the main
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character’s criminal instinct stimulated by certain characteristics of the neighbourhood; the inextinguishable thirst for love of Palmyra, inspired by the delightfulness
of her Portuguese country villa (La Quinta de Palmyra); the violent influence of
flame-coloured hair in the life of La roja; the irrepressible temptation of the
inhabitants of La casa triangular to indulge in a love triangle; and the affairs that can
arise between the city and “the minor of the moment” wandering around Berlin, told
in La mujer vestida de hombre, not to mention the influence of the modern
metropolis on the adventurous madness of characters like El caballero del hongo
gris… The exemplary text in that it illustrates the profound link between environment
and the being who lives in it is La hiperestésica, the female predecessor of
Giulietta degli spiriti—who, surrounded by objects, beings, smells, lights, “found the
special face of every thing” and whose nerves “pointed out directions, omens,
assumptions”. Like Chaplin’s Little Tramp in the modern city, about whose true
existence Ramón doubts, as he was to do later in his opera Charlot with music by
Bacarisse.
But the centre of Ismos, by which I mean the centre point from which
“ramonismo” stems—also expressed in the book—is “humorismo”: “[…] the antidote
to the most diverse things […] it is the reversion of all genres to their raison d’être,
it is one of the most difficult things in the world”, the only sensible attitude to adopt
towards the “fleetingness of life”. Therefore, “It is the most indispensable rational
duty, and on its pillow of trivialities, mixed with serious things, one rests fully”… It is
a lesson learnt by Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and other -isms, in which “there is
an atrocious humour that is neither mockery—beware!—nor fraud nor silent malice,
but genuine poetry, genuine imposition, genuine result”, etc. Ramón makes endless
comments on humour in Ismos, but also did so earlier in the time of Prometeo and
later in almost all his books and prologues to new types of books or books written
in new genres, as in various press articles. For example, in the Salamanca
publication El adelanto of 16 April 1931, in “El humorismo como instrumento de
lucha social” (“Humour as an Instrument of Social Struggle”), Ramón states that
humour “sets off its bombs in the peace and quiet of homes […] it is the other side
of the angle that makes tragicomedy”, raves and pushes the world, shunning norms
to get a better view of fallacy and change it and, most importantly, opens up “those
small circles in which life becomes […] manic, presumptuous and mean, however
much the great libertarian anthems play in the streets […] undoes its bows and
flowery adornments and prevents the worst of the Republic, which is the flowering
of pompous bourgeoisies”.
As stated early, life took a new turn for Ramón at the threshold of the thirties. It
darkened and with it his humour, which became almost a medicine to relieve his
pain and sadness. However, his digressions on this theme continued until the end
of his life, in a rare mixture of humour, solitude, illness and fear, dominated by the
“terrifying contrast” of the picture of the half-alive half-dead women who kept watch
on his study, and the brutal observation that “beings are machines of ambition and
betrayal” and that, therefore, “things are the only good thing in life”. He draws the
terrible conclusion that “the biggest way I have conned myself is by being too
cheerful […], but I am forgiven by the fact that it was thanks to this con that I had a
certain cheer”, and states very humorously that “The humourist is a cheerful man
whom others make sad”.
The very title of his autobiography, from chapter LXXXVI of which the quotes are
taken, is tragically humorous: Automoribundia.
There are as many examples of the interrelation between plastic arts and literature, and between both of these and “ramonismo”, as there are pages in Ismos,
since this interrelation constitutes the very essence of the book. Intoxication with
and from reality, possessing a “seeing” clear-sightedness with respect to it in order
to get by and find its signals, enjoying an inner freedom so as to broaden the world
through novels but also through the successive viewpoints of art, rebelling against
the established norms and shattering the hypocrisy of the world with the audacity
of Dadaism, building on rebelliousness like Picasso and Cubist art, knowing how to
give due account of what must remain beyond death, seeking and finding signs of
life outside and within oneself like the Surrealists, etc., are tasks and modes of living
of the great new artists; they are also accomplishments and a manner of living in
and through literature of Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Italo Calvino (who includes the
Spanish writer among his Six Proposals for the Next Millennium) suggested that
the achievement of a work of art lies in “making the speechless talk”. This idea could
be said to summarise the desire of a genuine artist.
Indeed, for loyal readers of Gómez de la Serna’s oeuvre, delving into Ismos
gives rise to so many suggestions regarding his works and view of the current
moment—the iceberg of profound reality—that a commentary on Ismos could trace
endless circles until it reaches only a provisional end point.
This, in fact, is the aim of the “celebration” in honour of Ismos. The forerunner
and man who once presided at the evenings at the Pombo, Ramón, is hosting
today’s major avant-garde gathering in the modern city which, this time, to the relief
of his lost soul, is Madrid.
Better late than never.
11. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Obras Completas XX, p. 835.
12. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Automoribundia, p. 604.
13. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Automoribundia, p. 606.
14. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Pombo, p. 289.
15. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Obras Completas I, p. 151.
16. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Obras Completas I, pp. 181 and 185.
17. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, La sagrada cripta de Pombo, p. 571.
18. Op.cit., p. 232.
19. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Obras Completas I, p. 932.
10. Idem, Obras Completas VII, p. 639.
11. Op. Cit. , p. 596.
12. Idem, Obras Completas I, pp. 1105-1118.
13. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Obras Completas III, p. 213.
An inward journey:
Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s study
Ana Ávila and John McCulloch
From his first trip to Paris in 1909 and his tours of the European capitals during and
after the First World War to his self-exile in Buenos Aires in 1936, where he was to
end his days, travelling was always a key experience for Gómez de la Serna. These
travels—whether his strolls around prewar Paris, where he wrote El alba after
observing many daybreaks, or his train trips through a world that was awakening
from the horrors of the great war that had rocked Europe and redefined the political
borders between states—were not only geographic ramblings. In many cases he did
not need to venture outdoors, as they were virtual travels from his study: a world in
itself, without limits or frontiers, where the imagination may wander freely, without
any obstacles, through a chaotic world of images and objects gathered and
accumulated with the yearning to free the creative process and explore the world
from many perspectives, as the Cubists had done.
The writer always regarded his study as a living space, where he spent long
hours engrossed in his papers and clutching his fountain pen. It should be
understood as a privileged environment, a sort of lair 1 where he sought refuge in a
compelling desire to achieve the solitude creativity required, but also a bubble in
which to organise a world of his own fed by hopes and obsessions, and also of
memories and nostalgia in the case of the one in Buenos Aires. The intellectual who
isolates himself to stimulate his literary flow is a hackneyed image, and depictions
of this figure surrounded by books in his study had been widespread since the
fifteenth century, as had self-portraits of the troubled genius accompanied by
melancholy. Bon’s illustration for the cover of El novelista (1923) appears to be a
portrait of Ramón himself concentrating by his desk. Politicians and researches of
the period chose to be portrayed in action in the context of their studies, which
symbolised their activity. This environment could become an ivory tower,
unassailable by possible contamination, seldom visited, where the entry of an
outsider is considered an exception to the rule and a unique opportunity. The
isolation that is anxiously sought makes this space comparable to a convent cell—a
term he came to use to refer to the turret in Velázquez 4, where the writer professed
utmost asceticism.2 His concealment and the image of the writer given over
intensely to his work to the point of spilling his blood on the paper—he was in the
habit of using red ink and yellow paper—make his study comparable to a catacomb.
Given the closed and functional nature of Gómez de la Serna’s study, he did not
find this term appropriate and preferred to call it a “cámara de trabajo (work
chamber).” 3 At the same time, the study helps us understand one of the most
innovative and avant-garde but also the most enigmatic authors of the twenties and
thirties, since it is a plastic confirmation of his view of the world and of his aesthetic.
In El novelista, one of his most paradigmatic works, Gómez de la Serna breaks
away from traditional narrative convention by presenting the reader with a
fragmented view of reality in the form of a mosaic of plots and anecdotes, rejecting
the idea of a static vision of the world. The writer character Andrés Castilla goes to
three different houses in different areas of the city in order to perceive it from
different perspectives. In a period when the certainties of a universe governed by
the Newtonian laws of science were in decline, ousted by the theories of
Heisselberg and Einstein, the creator felt the need to observe the world not from a
fixed reference point but from a variety of angles in order to express the complexity
of the universe. Ramón’s study should be understood in this context, as a space
where images and objects removed from their usual surroundings converge and,
crowded together, show us a multifaceted, complex world. They give rise to a
473
broken, dislocated view where the sum of the different parts is more important than
the end product. Like the Surrealists, Ramón sought a beauty that does not pertain
to the organic world and is not necessarily in harmony with the universe. The study
is an expression of the very subconscious, a manner of affording it physicality, where
objects uprooted from their contexts mingle and become familiar, and where many
realities converge as in the realm of dreams. As in the subconscious, respect for
context—so essential to art and to nineteenth-century aesthetic conceptions—is not
glimpsed in Ramón’s study; rather, we find the microcosm of a creative mind in
constant turmoil that is not interested in tying up the loose ends of a complex world
undergoing incessant change. The author confirms his aesthetic in his
aforementioned essay “Las palabras y lo indecible”, when he says that: “The point
of view of the sponge—of the sponge buried in the subconscious and watchful from
its submarinity—disturbs all sequences and consequences, distorts reality, is
distracted in the unconcerned, creates fixedness in the arbitrary, allows the
undeniable to be assumed […]. This is the end of that vision with two eyes and only
on the road and on the dotted line of what is within reach of those eyes. The
drunkenness of things in one’s head, the complexity of the result of looking, makes
us souls among many things facing the multi-eyed […]. That preying, spongelike
and hole-riddled mass we have in our head must from now on attempt supervision,
abandoning the absurd straight-line approach.” 4
This “absurd straight-line approach” is a key to interpreting Ramón’s study.
There can be no doubt that this fondness for blending real-life images and objects
in order to recombine them at the whim of this solipsistic author not only springs
from the new artistic and literary trends that aimed to break away from the traditional
aesthetic, but also from the author’s strolls through the streets of Madrid and El
Rastro. Like the compunction André Breton felt about frequenting the Marché des
Puces in Paris, Ramón’s fascination for the Madrid flea market is well known and
undoubtedly shaped his personal aesthetic. The writer was a regular visitor to the
Rastro and spent many Sundays wandering around its labyrinths picking up various
objects, some of which he would take back to his study and which would inspire
his images in prose. “Things try to tell us something but cannot”, he once said, and
even attributes things an almost human value when he proclaims that “We were
once things and will revert to being things.” 5 This view would be often appreciated
in his novels, where the characters are seldom explored in any depth yet the material
world plays an increasingly prominent role, as in one of the most emblematic ones,
El secreto del acueducto (1922). But his interest in objects not only lay in their
aesthetic value. Ramón stated that “From the tangle of things springs a higher truth,
that reform that transforms the world, affording it greater meaning,” 6 as if objects
held the secret to our universe. In the aforementioned novel, the main character,
Don Pablo, spends most of his time observing the aqueduct of Segovia and
transforming it through poetic images and metaphors, seeking the secret concealed
in its stones. Contemplation of reality plays a more significant role than the plot,
since it is through observation that the aqueduct comes to life, echoing the words
of Ortega y Gasset (to whom Ramón dedicated this novel) when he said that “we
see that the genre has shifted away from mere narration, which was only allusive, to
rigourous presentation.” 7 The philosopher added that the main purpose of art and
novels was “to see”: “Art has a counterposed mission, and goes from the habitual
sign to the thing itself. It is moved by a magnificent appetite for seeing.” 8 This visual
appetite is essential to understanding the environment of Ramón’s study. Perhaps
it was his interest in the world of objects that was to lead him to write one of his
first books about a market of objects, El Rastro (1914), which Francisco Umbral
interprets as “The fortuitous, random and poetic association of objects, freed of
their utility and from the scale of values that rite affords them.” 9 This aesthetic was
to pervade his extensive literary oeuvre, in which things acquire a special value, in a
deliberate reorganisation of the established hierarchy.
474
The study recreated for the exhibition is the one in Calle Hipólito Irigoyen 19746 in Buenos Aires.10 The city was not unknown to him when he settled in Latin
America after the Civil War broke out, as not only had he already visited it but he
was also married to the Argentine writer Luisa Sofovich (1932). Gómez de la Serna
aimed to lead a similar life to the one he had in Madrid (Velázquez 4; Villanueva 38)—
devoted to his work 11 and surrounded by the books and objects that progressively
populated his own private universe. The atmosphere we see in the photos of the
turret which illustrate La sagrada cripta de Pombo dominated that of the Buenos
Aires study where Ramón attempted to reproduce the Madrid environment that had
witnessed his vast creativity. The company of a woman, Luisita, a splendid
substitute for his wax doll, dynamised the sought-after independence of those
glorious years, and the Argentinian study thus acquired connotations of a place for
conversation. Indeed, Luisa actually described it as a “parlour-study,” 12 as apart from
the desk with books, it contained other pieces of furniture and a sofa appropriate
for chatting, as well as being populated with things arranged with a sense of
ornament. Whatever the case, she also called it a “creative workshop”, where,
according to her, the writer worked for sixteen hours a day, seldom venturing
outside;13 during his Argentine sojourn he was no longer a anchorite but had
become a man shut away with his memories and Creator of a universe of his own,
who also took with him his wife as a species to be protected in his own private
Noah’s Ark.
The Buenos Aires study was populated with things, functional and decorative,
most of which are now housed in the Museo Municipal in Madrid. Of the furniture,
apart from his desk, there is a supplementary table (from which a block of headed
sheets hangs, secured there by the writer himself) and two round-topped ones,
props for objects, one covered with a canvas with a map of Latin America painted
in oil. His wife’s desk is curious in that it is decorated with a porcelain rendering of
the performance of a piano piece for four hands, the “enamoured pianistic gloves”,
as Ramón called them in Automoribundia.14 A sideboard for the dinner service,
two filing cabinets, armchairs and chairs (he spent his last days in the contemporary
designed butterfly-shaped chair in leather and metal), as well as the sofa and two
shelves for books fill the space. Three screens cross the territory crammed with
illustrations that also extend to Luisita’s desk, the front of the sideboard and the
shutters of a window and even line the walls and ceiling, decorated with glass
baubles, while the frieze, walls and windows had mirrors trimmed into shapes
(mountains, human heads)—which he called futuristic and Picassian and designed
himself. In particular three convex ones (one very large) helped create the illusion of
a wider space, reflecting the surrounding environment and questioning limits:
“Placing mirrors on walls”, said Ramón, “is the most practical method of making
rooms larger.”15 We believe that the reproduction of the Marriage of Giovanni
Arnolfini decorating one of the screens could be due to the presence of the circular
mirror in the painting’s background which acts as a protective element, one of the
key elements of the work. The irregularly shaped mirrors served the purpose of
windows that enabled those inside to breathe.16 A well known photograph of Ramón
shows him on the brilliant surface of one of the mirrors of the Pombo,17 whereas
inside his Madrid turret he captured his own anamorphosis by staring at himself in
distorting mirrors18—he kept two of these in his Buenos Aires study—which proves
his interest in disturbing realities that aroused so much enthusiasm at the turn of the
century.
In this territory, Gómez de la Serna not only kept books and work but was
surrounded by diverse objects removed from their usual contexts, which, combined
in new ways by the author’s imagination, became sources for his famous greguerías
and novels. Ramón considered that the objects one lives with influence their owner,
even when their arrangement is changed, because we are in a way “the product of
the environment of things in which we live.” 19 For him these elements from the
material realm, which were neither at all pretentious nor transcendental, had their
own soul, a hallmark that gave them “character.”20 The repertory is diverse,
apparently bland. The writer said that his study in Buenos Aires had started off with
a bottle with a candle stuck in the neck. They are simple, small things, curios even,
acquired, according to him, in flea markets and pawn shops selling trinkets,21 and it
is no coincidence that he was a champion of chichi and praised rooms with objects
in suspicious recurring forms.22 Simplicity combined with curious and extravagant.
The surprise factor, an element in keeping with Ramón’s aesthetic, was provided by
the reflections (mirrors, shiny balls on the ceiling, glass paperweights, a car light),
by the transformation of several items when necessarily handled, and by the sound
of the mechanical objects (clock, caged bird). In a bronze statue of a nymph, which
was part of the writer’s desk, the figure can be undressed if we help the faun to
remove her clothing; and in another the nakedness of the young girl lying face down
is revealed when the bedclothes are drawn back: a “very Ramonian joke”, stated his
wife in the study inventory. The inventory lists as a sugar bowl the china fly with
metal head, legs and wings which, when the wings are raised, shows the
hollowness of the vessel to which these insects are supposedly attracted. A Portrait
of Ramón Gómez de la Serna writing (1931), by Carlo Washington Aliseris, a SelfPortrait (1951) and the Triple portrait of Luisa Sofovich (1937) painted by him23 and
regarded by her as the item of which he was fondest evince the writer’s interest in
art also from the point of view of practicing it. A box of paints and a couple of
dummies bear this out.
Ramón himself defined his Madrid turret as a “motley and monstrous mass” of
things, and this is the impression the photographs of the Buenos Aires study give 24.
This accumulative atmosphere of heterogeneous and simple things has led it to be
compared to a stall at the Rastro, the popular market he visited regularly and raised
to worthy literary status in a monograph. Its appearance of a constantly growing
grotto has led it to be related to Schwitters’s merzbau.25 A further reference might
be André Breton’s home-cum-workshop (Centre d’Art Georges Pompidou) that
was crammed with varied things and where artworks were placed on the same level
as apparently banal things in a magical atmosphere. The overcrowded turret
reminded Marie Laurencin, a friend of the Madrid writer’s, of Apollinaire’s study. In
Ismos Ramón devotes a chapter to the French writer (regarded by many as the
person who applied the Cubist aesthetic to literature and the first to use the word
“Surrealism”), whom he met briefly and held in high esteem. His interest in
Apollinaire is not surprising, since the latter advocated the importance of conceptuality above imitation in order to break away from nineteenth-century realism.
Like Ramón, the author of the Calligrammes was at the centre of the avant-garde
world, but at the same time was inspired and shaped by a rich literary tradition that
was to leave its mark on his oeuvre.
Ramón’s study as a creative space is essential to understanding the author’s
work, since his literary style stems largely from his skill at writing poetically and
humorously about any object (this is how many of his greguerías work), in order to
show that the artist need not necessarily be influenced by traditional literary
themes but can create poetry out of anything. Anthony Leo Geist states that “The
elements of new poetry coincide in that they are object oriented”26 and intended
to shed timeworn images and literary clichés. The preference for image over
anecdote was not peculiar to Ramón: this also underpinned ultraísmo, a short-lived
literary trend begun by Cansinos Assens and Guillermo de Torre in 1919 aimed at
affording status to objects and stripping the poem of everything that could prove
anecdotal. The alma mater of El Colonial, the other literary circle, recognised the
importance of objects in Ramón’s work, a characteristic which, in his opinion,
likened him to the cubists: “In Ramón Gómez de la Serna a new torch of pure
enthusiasm has been lit and manifested in a new artistic aim […] His literary oeuvre
relates to the new pictorial trends of Cubists and integral art. In something that
now surpasses our highest aesthetic combination and one might even say our
greatest ability to understand them. It is a truly Pannic oeuvre, from whose thirst
for representation nothing is excluded, for no aspect of things is forgotten by the
artist.” 27
This eagerness to attenuate the narrative and anecdotal elements not only
applies to Ramón’s oeuvre but also helps us understand his interest in objects
displaced from their usual environment and grouped together in a space where they
are valued differently. If we could sum up the centrepiece of avant-garde art of the
period, it would be the importance of inorganic and uprooted things, which
undoubtedly shapes the arrangement of Ramón’s study.
The Argentinian study was given to Madrid by the writer’s widow, who drew up
a manuscript inventory that was sent to the mayor 28 and published in the press.29
She confessed how tiresome packing it was and how she had been pressured by
his fellow countrymen, who considered themselves moral heirs to the writer’s
legacy.30 She had also received offers from American universities.31 A comparison
of the photographs of the Buenos Aires study with the Madrid legacy soon shows
the lack of papered surfaces on the walls and ceiling, which gave the study a unique
character and made it drastically different from the turret. His widow grumbled
about the difficulty of moving them and so they were left behind.32 In a letter
addressed to the mayor of Madrid in 1965, concerned by the fate that could befall
the writer’s belongings, she offered him the study, with the intention of its becoming
a “tourist attraction and place of pilgrammage for admirers” as well as a centre for
studies on Ramón,33 and this proposal was accepted. The Casa de la Carnicería
was mentioned as a provisional premises, as suggested years earlier,34 before it
was installed in the Museo Municipal.35 The study arrived in Barcelona in October
196736 and there are records of its reaching Madrid early in December.37 Luisa
Sofovich took responsibility for installing it, though it was not opened to the public
until June 1972.38
It would be beyond the scope of this article to give a detailed list of all the
objects and art reproductions in the study, but some noteworthy items and features
need to be mentioned. It is not easy to draw definite conclusions about such a
heterogeneous world, and the author himself warns of the danger of attempting to
do so. Ramón was always difficult to classify, a man who divulged avant-garde
trends without forsaking his reverence for the great authors and classical artists.
This is borne out by the biographies he wrote of authors and artists equally. His
commentaries on literary figures such as Quevedo (1950), Lope de Vega (1954),
Galdós and even John Ruskin39 confirm his profound dialogue with literary tradition.
The same can be said of the art world: despite his dealings with figures such as
Picasso, Juan Gris and Dalí, his extensive work on El Greco, Velázquez, Goya and
Gutiérrez Solana40 indicates his vast and eclectic cultural background. To define the
influences perceptible in the work of an author who wrote about figures as diverse
as Ibsen, Apollinaire, Kafka, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Marinetti, Charlie Chaplin,
Jean Cocteau and Maruja Mallo (to name but a few) is no easy task. A characteristic
of his work is fascination for things old and new, and this is an essential point in
order to understand the nomenclature of his study. Proof of this is his own library,
part of which is recreated in this exhibition. The books span many countries, periods
and themes: from Shakespeare to Proust, from Pope to Bécquer or Valle Inclán,
through Thackery, Molière and Antonio Machado. Such a rich cultural background
was only to be expected of someone who grew up in a cultivated environment in a
family of politicians and even had an aunt who was an author (Carolina Coronado).
Ramón warns us of the difficulty of pigeonholing him as a writer—something that is
also borne out by the diversity of images and objects in his study: “My pendulum
swings between two contradictory poles, between the obvious and the unlikely,
between the superficial and the abysm, between the coarse and the extraordinary,
between the circus and death.”41
475
Ramón’s connections with the avant-garde movements are essential to understanding his work. Throughout his European travels he met important people from
the world of art and literature. In 1909 he translated the first Futurist manifesto and
in August 1910 visited the Exposition des Indépendants in Paris. This awakened
him to new sensitivities and brought him into contact with exceptional creators such
as Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, Breton, Borges, Huidobro, Picasso, Dalí and the Delaunays, who had abandoned the French capital when the First World War broke out
and taken refuge in Madrid. The influence of such a diverse group is perceptible not
only in the author’s oeuvre but also in the composition of his study, particularly in
the pictures covering the walls and screens. However, Ramón’s innovative side is
just one facet of his personality and work. On one occasion he said “We are more
of the past than of the future”42—a statement which reflects an attitude appreciated
in many of his novels and in the pictures themselves.
The diversity of these influences is evinced both in his literary works and in the
repertory of the screens. Their panels not only reflect the world that emerged from
the First World War, with its cultural happenings and technological advances, but
also point to the past. These screens recreate reality from multiple fragments of
different periods, which share a space by chance, with no logical order but the
author’s whims. To break down each of the images recorded on them is a task that
would fill many volumes and would even be absurd. It would be similar to trying to
interpret each stroke of an automatic drawing. This eagerness for collecting
everything is the key to Gómez de la Serna’s narrative works; thus, at the end of El
novelista, the main character, Andrés Castilla, living a life of contemplation on the
coast, explains the central argument of the novel when he states that: “Novelists
should be many, different, interwoven, for there are one thousand aspects of reality
in their tides moved by fantasy, which must be perpetuated. All the combinations of
the world are necessary for it to end up properly unravelled, and if a law of necessity
inspires life, it could be said that it is good that all possible novels should exist and
that someone should devise those that appeared viable. “We must say all sentences, fantasise all fantasies, note down all realities, traverse as many times as
possible the map of the vain world, the world that will die of a blackout.”43
This enthusiasm for capturing everything, as this alter ego of Ramón’s states,
stems from the recognition that man is a fleeting being and the jumbled world in
which it has fallen to him to live will one day become history. Through the screens,
Ramón not only recorded what influenced him but also recorded the endless,
unfinished narratives like rivers that fork into hundreds of smaller ones which never
converge. The writer was not interested in leaving behind him a complete nineteenth-century-type oeuvre. What concerned him was to entrap different fragments,
whether of the cinema or sporting world, Egyptian or Roman sculpture, primitive or
modern art, and bring them together, without respecting the context, just as the
subconscious works. This is how his greguerías are constructed. The author takes
an object or an idea and transforms it into something different, or else shows us a
side that was not previously visible, through his humour and creative genius.
Therefore, we are not surprised to find a photograph of Charlie Chaplin beside the
photo of an African mask on one of the screens. Ramón affirms this deliberate
grouping together of images in Automoribundia: “The image of a single thing
scarcely means anything anymore. It is necessary to complicate it, graft it on to
others, wound it in the chest.
”Life must be given an appearance of nonsense, we need to complicate the
good-natured transparency of things.
”Artists and writers wish to achieve the difficult tangle of the most disparate
images and as it is a tangle that cannot be foreseen, some hit upon it and others
do not. And hitting upon it is a blind thing that results from the impact of images on
remote corners of the spirit, from the reaction of inner reflexes, from the appeal of
secret things.
476
”Could we explain that combination of images?
”We should not even try, since the symbol is often disguised among their nooks
and crannies, in the joins of their assemblies.
”So exhausted by the same images were we, so tired of seeing the same thing
from different angles, that we needed to arrive at contemplation of the esoteric as
a means of making our likes more agreeable.”44
What better surface than that of the screens to recreate a universe comprising
parts of different natures, to combine erotic with religious, modern with classical,
images of war with the hedonism of the roaring twenties, Western with Oriental art,
English hunting scenes with pictures taken from the motion picture world?
Putting in practice the collage technique linked to the avant-garde movements,45
the walls of Gómez de la Serna’s study in Calle Villanueva were covered in cut out
illustrations, as seen in a well known photograph by Alfonso and described by his
friends.46 He continued with this pastime in the Buenos Aires study: “My home
again became the house of pictures and mementoes stuck to the walls”. Almost
everyone who visited his home in Buenos Aires remarked on the originality of these
surfaces, which were almost a Ramonian hallmark.47 But it was not just the walls
and ceiling (at one point he came to cover part of the floor, protecting it with glass);
the papering extended to the furniture: the screens, shutters of a window, a sideboard and the surface of his wife’s desk.
Ti-Fan-To, inventor del biombo (Ti-Fan-To, Inventor of the Screen) is the title of
one of his salacious tales,48 while El biombo (The Screen) was the title of one of
the great novels of Andrés Castilla, the literary protagonist of one of his works.49
This piece of furniture came to be used by the writer in one of his lectures50 and
was among the objects from the Rastro, where Ramón found a small one with
Japanese portraits.51 He also had a screen in his last Madrid study, at least while
working on the monograph on El Greco: this one was functional as he stuck reproductions of the painter’s works on it as an aid.52 As they are profusely illustrated,
they look like half open books whose leaves can be read through images that
appear to capture universal history owing to their varied themes and overwhelming
information. Ramón subverted the habitual use of screens: whereas they are
traditionally used to conceal, he turned them into something that revealed and a
“frame for the monstrous decoration of studies”, as stated in El novelista; they are
an identifying feature of the Buenos Aires study. All three, with yellow supports, are
illustrated on both sides: two of them comprise three panels, the other five; and he
enhances them with delightful metaphors such as “polyptychs”53 entering the realm
of the greguería.
There must be a grain of childhood memory in this desire to cover surfaces
with paper, since in his autobiography he recalls how, as a child, he spent his
time “reading in space and in the papering”, even though he gorged himself on
flower prints. But Ramón himself informs us of the origin of these practice: the
cubicle of the toilet in the family home where his grandmother had pasted
illustrations of varied provenance, eminently popular, which covered the whole
room from ceiling to skirting board and even the door.54 Aware that this action
was by no means a novelty, the writer mentions some references to walls papered with music scores, menus, postage stamps, love letters and also the tiny
spaces of the shoe racks.55
During his Argentinian sojourn Gómez de la Serna promised himself he would
not fall into the temptation of papering his study, choosing to keep the walls bare,56
and, so he said, making do with a desk and a light bulb. But he gradually betrayed
this oath, buying trivial and curious objects and gradually cutting out and pasting
illustrations, converting it, as he called it, into a “pinacoteca paretaria”, which he
regarded as the most curious thing in the study.57 Just as an inmate isolated in his
cell devotes himself to writing on the walls, so does the writer, according to Ramón,
need to ornament his environment, also in his isolation. Having rejected the world
full of vulgar things that await him outside, he organises his universe with images
that evoke in his mind the genuine things life and art provided.
The overwhelming sensation that there is not a single crevice in which one’s
gaze may take refuge from this overloaded atmosphere is an innate characteristic
of the Buenos Aires study. The writer himself said that the cuttings covered
everything like a creeper, and mentions that at first he found the illustrations in his
Villanueva study smothering, and this caused him to suffer from fainting fits under
the “metaphorical pressure.”58 In Buenos Aires he continued to pursue the same
aim of stifling the spaces, leaving only one space blank, as he had the impression
that he would die if he covered everything. For Gómez de la Serna this idea—horror
vacui 59 and variety of images—holds connotations that relate to a new way of
looking at the world from a polyvalent rather than a single viewpoint: “the
monstrosity of current fantasy is the monstrosity of the world reunited and
shuffled.”60 This idea is evinced in his novels, which are populated with solitary
characters who seek meaning in a world of absurd dimensions, where the laws of
rational science are replaced by chance. At the formal level, anecdote is played
down and replaced by diverse images, similar to the aesthetic of his picture
collection.
Since this is a motley mosaic of illustrations—a “saturated culture of images”—
we are not invited to read them following any particular criterion. The viewer’s gaze
moves to and fro and one leads to another at a pace that allows no pause, dragging
the viewer past a string of images in which past merges into present as a graphic
expression of the permeability of borders and the emergence of a world in which
modernity and traditional heritage overlap. The pressing need to identify places,
times and people produces a pathological uneasiness, for we are also led back and
forth by fortuitous associations, seeking something to cling to for support. The
arbitrary nature of this universe is far removed from the photomontage of the
German Dadaists, whose chains are intended to convey a message (Hannah Höch,
Heartfield) and are not just combinations of formal and aesthetic games.
The extraordinarily visual nature of these surfaces is justified by the writer. “Life
is gazing”, he states in his autobiography, and man demands things to see, to have
in front of and around him, but lots at once. His widow mentions how he was fond
of relishing the sight of these horizons while smoking his pipe, travelling with his
indisputable mental agility through ages and places, recreating situations and
coming across friends and strangers who populate these mental landscapes.
Contemplating them also had curative properties, as when he felt unwell they
dragged him out of his malaise and, while the doctors in the portraits looked after
him, a women with a flower-adorned hat raised his spirits during the final years when
his end was approaching. The ability of the illustrations to transport the spectator to
unexplored or slumbering territories is inferred from the writer’s statement that “they
make life bigger and bring memories that would otherwise have been dead or
trapped among the pages of the books”.
The octagonal arrangement of the illustrations, how they were separated by a
snip of the scissors, and the variety of languages bring to mind an unconscious
defence of order. Through the photographs of the study and what was kept there,
we are able to appreciate a huge number of pictures, an apparently infinite repertory
that is expanded by means of the mirrors. The writer himself speaks of a “fugitive
panorama”. Personages, scenes, interiors, urban and country views, monuments,
machines, animals, flowers, objects, etc. one after the other in a constant Bergsonian flux, as if in an attempt to capture the universe and at the same time cram it
into a limited space, form a whole from fragments. The contrast is overwhelming:
beside a human head we are likely to find an artifact, a playing card, an animal or a
flower. It seems incoherent to see period portraits by Roman heads, the Virgin Mary
next to fashion models, and scenes depicted in paintings or engravings of the past
beside street scenes of the time. Shocking things find a justification in these
papered surfaces: it is like coming face to face with life itself, which is why horrific
images abound beside lyrical ones, extravagant next to simple, whirlwind images
that attract one’s gaze. This is how Ramón regarded the period in which it fell to him
to live: everything seen simultaneously and swarming, where boundaries fall apart,
where everything seems to be upside down, nothing in its place.61 Convulsive
decades of social upheaval, political crisis and wars, in which technological progress did not lessen poverty while the shop windows and magazines reflected the
consumerist pace of modern life. The jagged joins between the cuttings are superimposed in arbitrary chain fashion, showing a vibrating universe as if he wished to
express through collage the overlapping spaces of the Futurists and German
expressionists.
Now, the writer speaks of the “whirlpools” that sometimes emerge, providing a
plot amid the chaos; for example, a summer landscape is found beside a winter one
and a pair of woman’s legs could belong to a group of men in top hats, though
Ramón suggests that these contrasts are wrought by chance. Although the Dadaist
term is used, the spontaneous confrontation of images reveals formal and even
thematic parallels, as he himself recognises. This linking of different realities on the
same plane appears to display the mark of Surrealist collage, in which the more
shocking the association the greater the poetic spark. The closeness of human figures abounds in a desire, whether premeditated or unconscious, to draw parallels,
whether to show similarities or stress differences: old busts with contemporary
portraits, female sculptures of the past with models posing…. the head of a Hellenic
Greek satyr beside an African mask, Kefren facing the Cubist portrait of Braque
painted by Picasso, Goya’s Self-Portrait beside one of the El Fayoum heads, the
ace of diamonds opposite Rita Hayworth… But even the suggestive chimneys of
La Pedrera are connected to human heads… Those of men are paired with those
of dogs, so as to demonstrate, as Gómez de la Serna stated, the nobility of this
animal. An ass is placed near the one in Goya’s engraving of “Los Caprichos”, and
another seems to take a couple by surprise in a restaurant with violin players…
There are also recherché formal associations in the human figures’ positions; one
of very many examples can be found on the sideboard, where two women raise their
arms: one is an ivory figure of Minoan art and the other a modern-day one in a
bathing costume. The Psyche of Proud’hon’s painting decorating a panel of one of
the screens, arranged almost horizontally, appears to be one of the propeller blades
of the delightful photograph beside it… Hands hold up a vase while the flowers,
taken from another clipping, are still life. But elsewhere the associations are more
than formal, period or aesthetic comparison, for it is no coincidence that the
photograph of some steps strewn with corpses after a bombing62 is found beside
one of Goya’s “Disasters of War”, together with the tragic Bury and Be Silent
belonging to the same series.
The human body is a constant feature, shown totally bare or semi-naked, in the
form of mythological figures, saints, ballet dancers, models, actresses, contortionists… The sensuality of women, clearly conveyed by the Venuses painted by
Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, Lucas Cranach and Velázquez, among others, exude
eroticism—one of the characteristics of Gómez de la Serna’s novels. The Danäe
who is particularly given over to the pleasures of the flesh relates to what was one
of the most highly praised paintings in his emblematic nocturnal visit to the Prado63
and displays a heightened eroticism, as the lamp illuminates the legs of the reclining
women. Equally personal is Rembrandt’s rendering of the theme (Hermitage). On a
stamp we find the Naked Maja of his greatly admired Goya, a reference for Manet’s
Olympia which decorates a wall, while a screen displays the plastic nudity of Meret
Oppenheim photographed by Man Ray. The aesthetic contrasts based on nudity
must have been somewhat premeditated. It is rather suspicious that we should find,
in the same area, Leonardo’s Leda, Titian’s and Cranach’s Venuses and, furthermore, as if to provide another comparison, a Bather by Renoir. Rembrandt, the
477
darkness of whose palette is evoked in one of Ramón’s short stories64 and whose
etchings are mentioned fittingly as models for Goya, is also the author of
Bathsheba, another of his tremulous nudes. Among the scarce sculptures that
decorate the study it is possible to identify a detail from one of Bernini’s most
superb groups, Apollo and Daphne, representing the honest nymph being captured
by the god; she appears to be escaping from an impressive Manhattan placed
beside her. The picture of Gabrielle d’Estrées and one of her Sisters Bathing could
not have been selected on account of its authorship (School of Fontainebleau) but
because of the curious, albeit highly symbolic action of one of the women who is
feeling the other’s breast. Ingres’s Harem provides a conceptual contrast to
Manet’s Le dejeneur sur l’herbe and to the graceful Pompeian woman, and the
ethereal nature of Proud’hon’s Psyche and the Zephyr constitutes a counterpoint
to the eternity of Canova’s Paolina Borghese. A sculpture of the Three Graces
viewed from behind is not shown entirely but trimmed to draw attention to the most
delicate part of their bodies. A further interpretation of the female body is the
paintings of Seurat and of the women of Tahiti, the refuge of Gauguin, whom Ramón
does not ignore in his quest for the primitive,65 selecting Nevermore, one of his best
known pictures with the image of a new Venus.
These and a host of other women dynamise the surfaces; we find them nude,
scantily dressed, in bathing costume, advertising corsets, reclining in suggestive
poses, straightening their stockings, dancing (there are many pictures of dancers,
particularly ballet dancers, in some only the legs have been cut out), even artificial
women in the form of dummies… Legs are one of Gómez de la Serna’s fetishes as
the cuttings on the screens suggest—one is taken from an advertisement of silk
stockings showing almost an infinite number of legs—and in his literary works. The
fragmented body (there are also cut out eyes) is one of the hallmarks of the
Surrealists.
Tragedy and comedy are the two sides of the same coin. On one of the frames
clowns form a mosaic of colourful laughing faces, but Guernica provides a
counterpoint. Scatological, magical, lyric and curious elements pervade the
collection of pictures. Pedro Berruguete’s Auto de Fe cannot have been chosen on
account of the interest this Renaissance painter would have held for the writer, but
because of the macabre nature of the action, like the theme of Judith and
Holofernes, a cruel affair—dealt with humorously in a short story66—that is shown
through Botticelli and the Tintoretto of the Prado “Bible stories”, a painting stressed
on the occasion of his glorious nocturnal visit. Bosch, who, together with Brueghel,
he regards as a model for Solana, was attractive—let us remember the Surrealists—
on account of his paintings in which the world is turned upside down. A detail of
the Temptation of St Anthony triptych in Lisbon is reproduced in Ismos (“Humorism”), and this artist is mentioned in relation to the origin of some dreams: his
devils,67 perfectly seen in the Hell panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights, which
the writer pasted on the wall. The chapter on Surrealism of the aforementioned book
contains a reproduction of Arcimboldo’s allegory of Summer, which is also found
on the shutters of the study window. Whether originals or followers’ versions (there
is one in a plate in Automoribundia), the extravagant heads grabbed the attention
of the writer, who was interested in metamorphosis. Playful elements tinged with the
grotesque are represented by carnival scenes, such as the Burial of the Sardine,
painted by Goya and Solana.
Death, one of Ramón’s favourite themes, is found in corpses, skeletons and
suicides and suggested in some passages from the passion of Christ and the
bodies of holy martyrs. It is soon glimpsed by Luisa’s desk in the fearsome In ictu
oculi from the “Last Stages of Death”, by Valdés Leal, the most macabre aspect of
whose oeuvre he does not marginalise but links to the skeleton of death.68 As a
contrast or “warning” that is sought or coincidental, a couple by Renoir are dancing
beside it, unaware of their fate, in the style of the 17th-century vanitas. Curious
478
indeed is the photograph of a young woman over the simulacrum of a skeleton. The
Magdalene of the school of Luis de Morales would not have been selected for
reasons of attribution but rather owing to the presence of the skull in the hand of
the repentant woman. The power of “the female bone”, as Solana called her, can be
seen in Baldung Grien’s picture showing a knight carrying off a young woman while
the skeleton of death does not let her escape and clutches at her robes. The suicide
of a couple, the writer Stefan Zweig and his wife in a hotel bed in Brazil, commented
on in Automoribundia, stands out in one of the screens, where it is not possible
to tell if they are asleep or dead. A human cranium seen through X-rays can be
spotted on the papered surfaces of the screens—by no means strange for someone
who reflected on his “radiographic portrait,”69 and devoted one of the chapters of El
doctor inverosímil and some of the greguerías to this subject. As a double image,
it is a theme belonging to the Surrealists’ universe.
Leonardo’s Last Supper is one of the rare religious themes found in this mass
of pictures, while others are linked to the hedonism of the human body (Sodoma’s
St Sebastian; St Philip martyred, painted by Ribera) and his fondness for El Greco
(Disrobing of Christ, Burial of the Count of Orgaz, the Pietà from the Niarchos
collection…), Velázquez (Christ on the Cross) and Goya, with respect to whom
mention should be made of the festive nature of his paintings of San Antonio de La
Florida and the Last Communion of St Joseph of Calasanz he painted for the
Piarist fathers who ran the school Gómez de la Serna attended as a child.
In contrast, the universe of pictures Gómez de la Serna intended to live with was
peppered with Dionysian references. While they are glimpsed in the satyr of one of
the bronze sculptures in the study, Mantegna’s Bacanal, a delightful engraving that
is also spectacular on account of its size, afforded vigour to one of the sides of the
biggest screen. The Barberini Faun, one of the most famous items from the Munich
Glyptothek, is shown enraptured by gazes. Festive and playful moods are represented by works such as Goya’s tapestry cartoons, also showing dancing, one of
the most recurrent themes, and a certain view of women as portrayed in some of the
Aragonese painter’s “Caprichos” (They Already Have a Seat, The Straw Mannikin).
Although there are reproductions of abstract works—Paul Klee, Blue Night—
representational art is predominant. Time is aleatory: people from different eras
share the same plane, the time setting is altered over and over again, jumping from
Roman antiquity to the 20th century with an amazing speed and unconcern. In this
way Ramón manages to halt time. Owing to the arbitrariness, the authors of the
works of art coexist in a transgressive chronological proximity—Picasso is found
near Leonardo, Bosch, Goya… The same is true of writers, and also of his varied
writings on them. The conglomerate world does not allow classification. Sometimes
the author is found in the same space as his works, like Dalí on one of the screens.
There are cases of several by the same author sharing the same territory: three of
Goya’s cartoon tapestries are found on the window; five works by the Aragonese
painter cover one of the rectangles of a screen; and six Dalís illustrate the same
surface. Also striking is the repetition of the same work, such as Manet’s Bar at the
Folies-Bergère, and the presence of two versions of the same painting, such as
Leonardo’s Leda and the Swan. Even though we find only one rendering of the
theme of The Supper at Emaus, Vermeer’s painted version, there are several
Rembrandts depicting the theme among the cuttings in the study, indicating that
this biblical theme concerned the writer. One of the panels seems to be devoted to
the circus to judge by the many heads of clowns, a field explored by Gómez de la
Serna as evinced by El circo (1918), his own involvement in certain numbers, and
his friendships; indeed, he received honours from the Paris Academie de l’Humour
and was held to be the “Official Chronicler of the Circus”. It is no coincidence that
the screens include Miss Lala at the Cirque “Fernando”, an oil painting by Degas.
It is interesting to note the constant presence of art and literature through
authors and works, two aspects that constitute a constant feature in the personal
and creative life of a writer who also painted. “It is all lies, yet painting and literature
are truth that postexists, the only certificate, the only mirror that is not broken, the
only complete saint’s day”, he writes in his biography of El Greco. The introduction
to Ismos includes an apology of overlapping in the arts, from which “new art” would
emerge; this explains why on the illustrated surfaces of the studio there are as many
references to Apollinaire and his oeuvre as there are to Picasso and his.
Writers (many of whom are identified by hand and are often found near the
edges), artists and works of art are often directly related to Gómez de la Serna. He
wrote monographs on some painters (El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Gutiérrez Solana,…) or referred to them in Ismos and other publications, and also in his greguerías. Some paintings are very closely linked to the writer, such as Solana’s Tertulia
at the Pombo, while the highly regarded portrait of Joan of Castile decorating the
sideboard, attributed to the Master of the legend of the Magdalene, would have
been related to a specific interest in the Catholic Monarchs’ daughter, about whom
he wrote a novel. The writer’s view on the plastic arts can be seen in his writings,
friendships and everyday affairs. A regular visitor to museums, he frequently
mentioned the Prado in his works, not only El Paseo del Prado (1922) but also
La sagrada cripta de Pombo. “We envy being a picture”, he stated in a text
dedicated to the Cretan. In 1949 he announced he was writing a Historia Universal
de la Pintura.70
We could also discuss the desacrilisation of artworks, since their artistic
connotations are shunned in his study, where they are placed beside popular
personages, everyday scenes, animals…. Questions of taste and friendship, but
also, bearing in mind the suggestive associations that could be inferred from human
beings, compositions, poses, forms and themes, we ought to regard them as
reasons for cutting out reproductions, through which we are nonetheless informed
of the writer’s knowledge of the artistic manifestations of various periods, on which
he not only owned books but also specialist journals. Whatever the case, we should
also suggest that when cutting them out he was not always acknowledging their
interest as works of art, since a head, a pair of legs, a balcony, a landscape etc.
could to his mind possess the properties of a new language and, accordingly, an
interpretation that was not confined merely to artistic aspects.
Picture cards that were free with bars of chocolate, free gifts from department
stores and perfumeries, illustrations of children’s stories, etc. constituted the mass
of pictures that Ramón’s grandmother progressively arranged around the family
water closet. Cards can also be seen in his study—reminder cards, playing cards
and ancient cheques—but the cuttings are mainly illustrations from books and
magazines: “it’s the same to me”, he said, “whether I chop up an expensive book or
a collector’s magazine”. We know for sure that he quartered a monographic edition
of a French publication, L’Illustration, on the deterioration of the religious art heritage
as a result of the Civil War: “Le martyre des oeuvres d’art. Guerre civile en
Espagne” (January 1938). Some selected works of art (Giorgio de Chirico, Man
Ray, Giacometti, Max Ernst, Dalí…) were reproduced in La Révolution Surréaliste
and Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, while Minotaure published the
photo by Man Ray of Óscar Domínguez’s cart and the model wearing a dress by
Lucien Lelong, precisely in one edition, the 10th published in 1937, the cover of
which, by Magritte, is also found on another part of the same screen. The Museo
Municipal in Madrid houses dozens of clippings from magazines, loose pages or
complete articles. Particularly noteworthy are “I Maestri della Pittura Italiana”, and
features from French magazines on Toulouse-Lautrec (he had a poster of his torn
from a Paris billboard on the ceiling of the turret before he covered it with glass
baubles) and Braque. On one of the study walls we can spot the delightful
illustration inspired by Oliverio Girondo animating “Croquis sevillano” in Veinte
poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía (1923), a work Ramón adored, and which was
written by an author who he admired and was among his best friends.
Photographs showing him working in his turret, details of the room, of writers
(several of Verlaine in the café) and reproductions of works of art—Esquivel, Gisbert,
Solana—illustrating Pombo and La sagrada cripta de Pombo are found among
the pictures. Also some of the photographs included in Ismos, such as humourist
G. B. Shaw, Henri Rousseau’s Portrait of Pierre Loti, Picasso’s Two Brothers, and
Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical Interior, whereas Automoribundia reproduces
photographs of him and his wife and the portrait of Gómez de la Serna looking at a
book, but also the cover of the monograph he devoted to the aforementioned café.
A tool that is typical of those who practice the art of collage must have been an
extremely everyday feature of the study, scissors. Tijeretear (“to snip”), a verb he
used, was a pastime full of magic. This instrument found its way into his greguerías:
“The long scissors for cutting paper are anxious to take long snips at the paper […].
They await it tempting us. We come across this yearning whenever we look at
them.”71 The following step consisted of arranging and fixing the cutting with glue.
Many tubes of paste—his wife said that he prided himself on his doctorate in
“stickoscopy”—were spent on the Buenos Aires study. The humidity that the writer
came to notice caused the paper to slip and peel off, and he therefore used small
nails to secure it in place, the sort shoemakers use around the edges of half-soles.
He confessed to being an inveterate “nailer of nails”, a practice to which he
attributed more than merely functional connotations. Illustrations are interspaced
with others that are covered over or of which a particular side can be detected; by
covering them he buries them—he refers to the “superimposition of corpses”—as
they are no longer attractive. In both screens and window several layers of papers
can be distinguished, and on the lower part of the shutters there are remains of
notebooks that were also once nailed there. Some illustrations are altered by means
of collage, which transforms reality: to a building in Gran Vía is added the detail of
another one and the still life of the Bar at the Folies-Bergère is camouflaged
beneath an advertisement for bottled beverages.
Ramón distances himself from reality by trapping it in his pictures and, from the
observatory of his study, peers out at a world he himself has selected from snippets
of the past and present, just as when we contemplate a dreamlike landscape from
a lookout point. The huge number of pictures and their encyclopaedic nature makes
it impossible to give a short commentary (figs. 4, 5). The works that appear range
from antiquity to the latest -isms, with an emphasis on certain artists and trends. His
dedication to African art in Ismos is paralleled by the abundant idols and masks on
the screens; there are also views of the pyramids of Giza, Egyptian and Roman
heads and reliefs and ancient statues, and singular works such as the Capitoline
wolf and the Lady of Elche, a funereal bust that returned to Spain in the early forties.
The Gioconda stood out in a huge reproduction on one of the walls; it was one of
his fetishes, which he wrote about from an early age, incorporated into short stories
and addressed humorously in the greguerías, not to mention the robbery, of which
Appollinaire was accused.72 El Greco (Knight with Hand on Breast) is reproduced
on a can of Argentinian oil kept in the study and in a lecture by means of a device
that caused the figure to lower its arm), and Velázquez and Goya are present with
works on different themes; particular attention is given to the Aragonese artist
through portraits, cartoons and engravings and also through a number of religious
compositions. Avant-garde art is all over the surfaces, which display abundant
works by Picasso and Dalí, but also Giorgio de Chirico, Giacometti, the “machinist”
Léger (representative of “Tubularism”) and the Dadaists (Man Ray, Duchamp) while
Surrealism is broadly represented (Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Miró, Tanguy, Magritte,
Delvaux…), and we find some objects (also by Óscar Domínguez and Kurt Seligmann) that define one of the most interesting aspects of the movement–”sleep”, he
wrote in a greguería, “is a lost property office”—and a photograph of André Breton
taken by Man Ray. All this taking as precedents Matisse, Henri Rousseau and the
post-impressionists, who are also dealt with in Ismos.
479
The numerous objects in the study clearly indicate Ramón’s fascination with
everything that has passed from life to death. There can be no doubt that this
interest in inanimate things partly derives from a Cartesian view of life, which
conceived humans as something very far removed from the rational being according
to Aristotelian tradition, as a merger of the brain in an almost automated body. One
of the Cartesian concerns was attempting to understand how these two entities,
which seem so incompatible at first sight, could function. Artificial versus life was
also a Surrealist concern, that of exploring this frontier world between living and
inert. Ramón’s interest in wax, a material with which the human form could be
imitated but which becomes distorted and complicated under heat, shaping
macabre images, was central to the aforementioned artistic and literary movement.
This idea of an artificial woman was very much present in Ramón’s oeuvre; the bust
of a wax woman in the Buenos Aires study is proof of this. The inorganic woman
was one of the fixations of Gómez de la Serna’s life and works, and wax one of his
fetishes.73 In the Madrid turret he had a pair of Oriental servants made from this
both literary and personal, and finds its greatest expression in El doctor
inverosímil (1921), though also in many pages of his autobiography77 and in
stories such as “El gran griposo” (“The Great Influenza Sufferer”) and “Se presentó
el hígado” (“The Liver Presented Itself”). His love of pharmacology could originate
from his childhood years, since in his memoirs he recalls having visited the Military
Pharmacy near the Royal Palace many times. Receptacles containing potions
appear fairly regularly in his literary works. For example, in one of his greguerías:
“Pharmacy flasks, those jars like small funerary urns, are the cinerary urns of those
who took the exclusive and special medicines of those pharmacies most faithfully
and in greatest quantity. A fine sign of gratitude on the part of the pharmacist!” 78
The jar with “Ideas” is one of his inventions, very similar to the one he owned in
the Madrid turret,79 and is related to creative inspiration. He sketches it in La
sagrada cripta de Pombo, explaining how it came about: “A pharmacy jar I took
out at the banquet thrown for Grandmontagne and from which I extracted the ideas
for my address.”80 Logically, delivering a lecture requires mental agility and a good
material and his favourite companion was a wax doll—the sublime expression of
eternal beauty, the image of the ideal woman. During his Argentine sojourn his wife
Lusita took the place of the wax one as in her he found the aspects he admired of
the inorganic version. The doll was not a dummy but rather a bust, though with the
same tone as Lucía, the man character of La mujer de ámbar (1927). The artificiality of Ramón’s characters makes it impossible for the reader to identify with
them. They are aesthetic creations lacking in human depth. This interpretation of the
human being also shapes the novel Cinelandia (1923), in which Ramón confirms
his interest in the world of motion pictures (personages from this world such as Rita
Hayworth, Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin, Eisenstein and Disney are found on the
screens), but shows the dark side and fears of the modern city. The view of human
beings is desolate and lugubrious. When one of the characters, Abel, comes across
the actress Virginia, her words sum up the general feeling: “Why have you come?
[…] There is the same emptiness here, however much the morning is a cheerful
beach morning […]. Our soul is raped by the spotlights.”74
stock of subjects and words to develop the argument. The presence of a jar of ideas
from which to draw helps ensure a good discourse, and therefore Ramón, an
inveterate lecturer, often took it with him when he spoke in public. Witticisms, which
he terms ideas and aspires to patent, appear to be vital to Gómez de la Serna, and
are also to be found in his repertory of greguerías, such as the following: “When a
man dies, his ideas are filed away; but the key to the archive and the archive are
lost”, while at another point he compares a book to a “pastry of ideas.”81 In contrast,
There is no doubt that, despite the fascination Ramón felt for modernity and
avant-garde vicissitudes, his work is permeated by a feeling of emptiness vis-à-vis
life: ”In the incorruptible atmosphere of the Pombo, surrounded by absolute
emptiness, we become completely and utterly aware of this living insignificance that
the intemperance of the social ambit—inorganic, ambiguous, inhuman—plunges into
us and makes us assume more.”75
Objects that function mechanically were to the liking of Gómez de la Serna—a
taste in keeping with the era and with a long tradition. In La sagrada cripta de
Pombo he mentions his music boxes and a mechanical quail, but also an artificial
bird acquired in “Le Paradis des enfants” in Rue Rivoli, which he fed aspirins instead
of sugar cubes. In El incongruente (1922) an automaton in the form of a bird is
mentioned and there was one such item among the belongings in his Buenos Aires
study. An automatic doll was also part of the mass of objects in Ramón’s Madrid
study, as was the Segovian clock in which a man and woman gazed into each
other’s eyes in pace with the rhythm of the pendulum, a cuckoo clock and one with
music. One of his short stories was about a clock that laughed, that uttered guffaws
every minute, i.e. the “laughing clock” , as it was entitled.76 In the Buenos Aires study
a clock in the form of a man’s body was among the objects and can be seen in the
photograph illustrating plate XXIV of Automoribundia, showing the writer in the
foreground. In fact clocks were one of the most frequently mentioned objects in his
literary works, not only due to their functionality but because they were a traditional
allegory of life and death, and those that imitate the figure and movements of an
animate being have playful connotations.
The subject of disease and medicinal treatment and the observation of the
physical nature of the human being was one of Gómez de la Serna’s obsessions,
480
he uses a dramatic formula to describe his everyday financial difficulties in Argentina, stating that it takes a year to come up with the idea for a story or original theme
for an article, a month to capture the idea, two months to think over the subject and
develop it, and five hours to make a fair copy of the idea after working all night. All
this for a total of thirty coins.82
There was also a bottle of “Opium” in the Buenos Aires study,83 while among the
things in the Madrid turret was one labelled “Hemlock” in case he ever needed to
poison himself.
On one of the shelves in his study was a wooden eye from an anatomy lab,
which was special in that it could be taken apart. It is “the eye that sees all”, stated
the writer when his friends enquired about it.84 In the Pombo “Eye” was one of the
decorative words in what was one of the curious activities engaged in at the café.85
In the monograph dedicated to eyes, Gómez de la Serna describes how the Calle
de Carretas was the street with the best shops specialising in products related to
the observation of the human body and orthopedics; in their shop windows one
found “the eye that can come out” and “the imitation heart, the heart with all the
branches hanging from it, everything enlarged so that it can be grasped well by
students’ imagination.”86 A heart that could be opened up was also part of the
writer’s everyday objects. However, it should be mentioned that in his study in
Velázquez he also had a heart, a real one, inside a bottle.87 The heart is one of the
elements that appears in the caricature-like drawings of the writer in his study that
illustrate La sagrada cripta de Pombo and Automoribundia, such as Bon’s.
With characteristic humour, on several occasions he makes this vital organ the
subject of his digressions. In “El que ha pensado mucho en el corazón” (“He who
has Thought a lot about the Heart”) he confesses he is a corazonista, that is, a heart
specialist, and defines this organ with descriptions such as the following: “The heart
is an empty case, a dry, tight thing that will stop like a pendulum so distant from the
possible pains of the clock […],” and as “a red rubber light bulb which is moved and
squeezed […], if not by a hand, by a mysterious pressure […].”88 Indeed the
implausible doctor—i.e. he himself—was convinced that he would die of a simple
cold having developed coronary complications, though Ramón also pointed out that
he was a patient who enjoyed good health. “La acinesia y el corazón” (“Akinesia and
the Heart”) is a long story in which a cascade of metaphors evinces the writer’s
interest in that part of the body, which was an allegory of feelings and of the
passage of life, and as such a death machine: “Bluish and bright red and dark red,
it is the flag of our life, the tatters of our langour, the purse of our true wealth.”89 Ramón himself illustrated an extensive treatise on hearts with nine delightful drawings
in Gollerías, giving them titles that identified the character or status of their owners:
“Heart on a sleeve”, “As big as a house”, “Poison”, “Drunkard’s heart”, “Gamester’s
heart”, “Spoilt heart”, “Maternal heart”, “Volcanic heart”, “Romantic heart.”90
A theme of Caprichos (1956), the title of one of the major novels by Andrés
Castilla, the main character of El novelista (1923), is precisely El corazón artificial.
La que no existió (“The Artificial Heart. She who did not Exist”), that is, another of
his artificial women. In his final years in Argentina, the heart continued to be a matter
of concern, which he now felt to be a repository of silence, memories and anguish.91
That idea of death is found in his repertory of greguerías: “We think some nights
that the heart spring is going to come loose like that of a clock, when, so tightly
coiled, it slackens and opens in a wide and uncurled curl […]. So does the heart
seem to have progressively uncurled in the chest and now completely occupies it,
without pressure and without the strength to start all over again tomorrow.”92 It is
also a witness of time: “The heart cannot be deaf, because the telephones of the
arteries inform it of what happens in life” and “The heart measures everything that
happens in blood.”93
A wooden board from an anatomy laboratory showing a longitudinal section of
the human body is another of the rare items in his Buenos Aires study which no
doubt recalls the monumental anatomical painting he had in his Madrid turret, which
was kept behind a door and opposite an interesting photograph.94
Various objects were related to another of the themes that interested Gómez de
la Serna, death. This is borne out by a pair of craniums—“The skull is a dead clock”95—
beneath a crucifix with a skull between two weeping cupids, an hourglass—“in the
hourglass Time feeds itself”96—that relates to his teenage memories of when his
father came home with a clock of this type,97 and a metal plaque with the words
“Danger of death” and its most usual representation, a device to protect the books
in his library from being stolen.98 There was a similar one among the things in the
Velázquez turret, though with a more precise reference.
Gómez de la Serna illustrated an extensive text that highlights his ability to be
accommodating even with death by means of his characteristic humour.99 He, who
considered himself the “Chronicler of the dead”, as one of his cards from the Madrid
days stated, treated death as a constant feature of life, and his friend Gutiérrez
Solana was a literary and visual parallel. Precisely in his turret he was particularly
attached to a picture of Living Death, a life-sized semi-corpse-like woman.
Automoribundia and Nuevas páginas de mi vida, both of which are
autobiographies written during the Argentine years, express the idea of life
experienced with the melancholy of a vanitas. Los muertos y las muertas (1935),
which ends with a chapter entitled “Final hour”, takes a look at life and death,
combining the grotesque and bitter humour with ancient Spanish literary and artistic
tradition.
The broad variety of stuffed animals Gómez de la Serna came across during the
course of his strolls through the Rastro represented new ideas in the environment
of the flea market as they were decontextualised.100 Among them tortoises. There
was precisely a small one in the Buenos Aires study which was special in that its
shell could be opened to show the inside of the animal, as if it were a box. During
the Argentine years he also acquired a stuffed hen whose insides, with an egg,
could be seen. Some of his short stories mention other stuffed animals,101 and there
is a significant image in El chalet de las rosas (1923): Amanda, one of the conquests of Roberto, a murderer of women, moved her belongings to the house,
including a stuffed bird; when they moved to Paris the criminal thought that the best
way of evading justice would be to hide behind the profession of naturalist-
taxidermist, and made the window of a shop of this kind, of which there are so many
in the city, his “ideal refuge”, though perhaps he resorted to this strategy to practice
a new variation on crime as he was growing bored with his mate, whom he already
regarded as a stuffed women.102
Like Roberto in the novel, Ramón also had his own collection, since the animals
were joined by a group of butterflies in a box, now in a deteriorated state. The
writer’s fondness of butterflies led him to place wooden or china ones on the walls
of the Madrid turret, near his wax doll, just as they fluttered around the Buenos Aires
study. One of the decorative words drawn by the members of the literary circle at
the Pombo was “Butterfly”, no doubt in allusion to one of Ramón’s passions. He
devoted an extensive treatise to these insects103 and discussed them in one of his
lectures, using sheets of cardboard to which fabric and sequinned ones were
nailed. One of these and three costume jewellery butterflies and a large attractively
coloured and luminous one protected by a sheet of glass, which adorned one of the
panels of one of the screens, show the writer’s interest in these creatures. He even
confessed he was a “lepidopterologist”—a love that extended to his clothing, as he
was fond of wearing a bow tie, a garment that attracted them, and even had a
butterfly chair in his Argentine study. He found them to possess properties that
humans lack, but which are enviable, such as metamorphosis. He also underlined
their ability to camouflage themselves through mimesis, just as humans also disguise themselves metaphorically against what they fear. Although he takes a somewhat scientific approach to butterflies’ variety, he classifies them humorously,
according to human schemes, as messengers. In the pictures in his study these
insects pose on human bodies, associating ephemerality and female flightiness,
and cut out ones flutter over flowers. But these beautiful “calling cards which
announce spring”, eminently poetic on account of their beauty and fugacity, their
ability to transform themselves and their fluttering halfway between reality and the
realm of illusion, caught the attention of the Surrealists, reference to whom is found
in the aforementioned essay.
The objects in the Argentine study include several paperweights, which Ramón
regarded as a “supertreasure”. Plate XXIII of Automoribundia shows a circular
table with a good many of these. A later photograph is described as “The beach of
the paperweights, illuminated by the lighthouse”, since in the centre there was a
lamp, as there was on the table. One of the chapters of El incongruente (1922),
entitled “On the beach of the paperweights”,104 on which the aforementioned
statement must have been based, was devoted to these “glass balls”. The writer’s
widow confessed that these transparent objects were one of the first things he
began to acquire upon settling in Buenos Aires.105 Twenty-three were listed in the
inventory of the donation; several with floral and vegetal adornments, no longer
functional given their beauty, still survive. They are not as lovely as the ones Gustavo
saw on Tiritana beach, which “were much more alive than those placed on desks,
which did not have the breath of an inner life”. There are other small ones in the
Argentine study: one is carved with Gandhi’s head, another has an illustration of a
cranium and in one we find the paper portraits of Ramón and Luisa beside a dry leaf.
Paperweights are one of Gómez de la Serna’s fetishes, a fixation that dates back
to the hazy memories of his childhood: a glass ball with a lizard or a spider inside.106
The beauty of these objects lies in their luminosity, in their smoothness and in their
decorativeness, as well as in their shapes, sometimes globular sometimes polyhedral. The writer applies a host of metaphors to them, such as “rocks of light”, owing
to their brilliance. The ones in Ramón’s study, with vegetal and floral elements,107
give off glittering colours; Ramón says that a paperweight “only with a fly inside
would always be worth a lot”. Indeed, he calls himself a “paperweight naturalist” and
examines them as if they were specimens from an enchanted laboratory. He regards
the bubbles that normally dwell inside them as “a suspension of last sighs”, the
“tears” that weep upwards for the nostalgia of the first dew on their gardens, and
481
says it is a delight to contemplate “the immunity of the colour of their meadows, the
intangibility of the petal in their abysm, the impunity of forms in their safe-conduct”.
The description of the paperweights the protagonist of El incongruente comes
across exudes great beauty, for the submarine flowers were lively and palpitating
“like the sexes of anemones, moving their fringes in the bottom of their transparent
and dense glass valve”. And their variety was wondrous: “Coralline, chrysanthematic, with multicoloured peas, multipetals, iridescent, with four-leafed clovers, with
pollen of a Siren, with striated and nyctalopic eyes, with pearls and pink bulbs,
everything was mingled beneath their translucent glass, soft glass like that of a tear
or the effusiveness of love”. Such was the attraction they held for Gómez de la
Serna that he regarded them as products of divine making, the only thing that God
continues to make since creating the world.
Paperweights represent immortality, a property that irremediably attracts
humans. He therefore considers them to be “glass sponges” of time. Everything
around us is transitory, but the flowers of these sturdy “beacons” do not wither. Our
gaze is captivated by these glass “grottoes” which are like repositories of the
yearning for perpetuity. Therefore their flowers never sleep at night; they are always
wakeful since after sleep comes the danger of death. While contemplating them is
a form of escapism through forms and colours, the writer came to identify them with
“roses of motionless winds” and “ecstatic compasses” which have even saved the
shipwrecked sailor. Humans who feel metaphorically suffocated aspire to seize a
paperweight in whose solidified mass safety dwells. This story of El incongruente
exudes this idea of escapism: Gustavo, a lost soul like so many of the novelist’s
characters, and indeed the writer himself, finds himself on an unknown beach where
even the sheets of paper in his pocket slip away; the paperweights that run after
them like tortoises and catch them are their anchors but also his own.
The transparency of these objects makes them allegories of truth, and even a
criminal amazed by the sight of them could not help touching them, leaving his
fingerprints on them. Gómez de la Serna is not unaware that these objects are
collectors’ items and particularly coveted, so he says, by millionairesses, aristocrats
and the wives of great painters whose names could be found in a special guide.
Antique dealers were in the habit of acquiring them to sell to foreigners.
A few wooden and china objects stand on the shelf and on and below the
desks, like pets, and are referred to in his extensive repertory of greguerías for a
variety of reasons (appearance, noise, character or culinary properties), but
generally in comparison to the human kind: a small white rabbit, a panther, a toad
and cats, which he not only found in the nooks and crannies of the Rastro but at
the Pombo—they were familiar with the secrets of the group, at whose banquets
they rubbed against their legs like cello strings—and in the shop windows he was
so fond of gazing at. Birds fly across the walls of his Buenos Aires study, providing
visual and emotional subterfuges, linking the closed world of the study with man’s
innate longing to fly: ducks and seagulls, which “emerged from the handkerchiefs
that bid farewell at harbours.”108 The cock is also an anachronism of this study. One
of the decorative words from the Pombo members’ contest is the name of this
animal,109 to which Ramón devotes an extensive story with illustrations of his
own.110 The novelist adopted the peculiar song of this bird, and boasted about his
achievement: “I imitate the cock, not only the crowing, but also the naturalistic
cackle that does a very real scale at siesta time.111 Regarded as an achievement
with humorous undertones, in one of his peculiar lectures he imitated “the cock
with a realist cackle, the persecuted cock, the cock that is caught and the cock
whose neck is finally wrung.112 The inventory of belongings in the study states that
the china crow recorded is “Poe’s” (a reference to his famous poems); this
American author is one of the most frequently mentioned names in the Spanish
writer’s works.
Disparate objects are found side by side in a common space and blend with the
482
chaos of the picture-covered surfaces, creating an arbitrary and curious atmosphere, half way between a Rastro stall and an enchanted mannerist grotto full of
surprises: “Becoming acclimatised to an object and yet hating it, driving its triviality
towards deserts and beaches, combining it with the rest of the universe and in this
manner arriving at the rupture between good sense—which is stagnant—and the
imagination, reaching through this essay in distorting the world a deeper view of
humans and images without affectation.”113
The microcosm into which Gómez de la Serna transformed his different studies
was further characterised by galactic elements in the form a large number of
coloured glass baubles suspended from the ceiling—an emblematic space for him—
which was his heaven, as he himself stated,114 accompanied by a rocket. These
glass objects enabled anyone who looked up at them to indulge in escapism, but
the writer was aware of the effect of their reflective properties of creating the illusion
of a larger study.115 This ability to split into two also helped him in his work, since
Gómez de la Serna had the impression that they reproduced the act of creation, the
purpose of his frenzied and suspicious literary activity.116 When he lived in Madrid
he acquired these baubles, present in childhood memories—a large one hung from
the dome of Bazaar X—from second-hand shops, and the junk dealers of the Rastro
kept them for him. But they are not merely banal objects, as they held a
transcendental value for Ramón: they are the repository of hopes and sadness, real
crystal balls, reflections of oneself in which the future could be seen. Indeed, he
attributed symbolic connotations to the coloured ones: the green ones signify “the
gloomy future of hope”, the blue ones have “seas of suspended shipwreck” and the
purple ones “ooze melancholy”, whereas the silver ones are “the mercurial colour of
cold” and are like “large tears of God”; he was wary of the pecuniary connotations
of the gold ones. From this heaven came the light that illuminated him in his work
and stimulated his inspiration. Such was his regard for these pieces that in “Las
cosas y ‘el ello” (“Things and ‘the id”), when associating humans with objects he
states that he could not care less if he were an inkwell, a cage or a crystal ball. They
were part of the collection of heterogeneous things that Ramón would pull out
during his suitcase-lectures.
The inventory of the Buenos Aires study lists a hundred or so glass baubles of
different sizes, as well as five huge solid ones, two of which are covered in tiny
mirrors, reflecting and creating endless distortions, complicating and questioning
the relationship between real and imaginary.
In the aforementioned environment, the multiple fragments of reality recombine
to present us with a constantly changing, multifaceted world, helping us understand
one of the most enigmatic twentieth-century authors and bearing witness to the
heterogeneous influences that dynamise his work. Like the many characters in his
novels, Gómez de la Serna seeks refuge in an aesthetic space to escape from an
absurd world. His study enables him to embark on an aesthetic and literary adventure, but without losing sight of reality. Inspired by the great classics such as Jorge
Manrique, Cervantes, Quevedo and Larra, yet at the same time capturing the
transitory and disintegrated world of modern society. Ramón deserves the praise of
Julio Cortázar, who stated that as an author he deserved to be “at the height of our
Hispanic letters.117 However, the writer spoke honestly of his own limitations, recognising the complexity and futility of the achievement of any aspiration: “We
should always fear getting life completely right, that is, coming across this
phenomenon of rightness. Let us understand well this breakdown and looseness of
the environment and outdoors, and let it wander about our pages.”118
11. Bonet, J. M., “Ramón y los objetos y el surrealismo”, El objeto surrealista en
España, exhibition catalogue, Teruel, Museo de Teruel, 1990, pp. 25-31.
12. Gómez de la Serna, G., “Ramón en su torre”, ABC, 3-7-1962.
13. La sagrada cripta de Pombo (1924), Madrid, Comunidad de Madrid-Visor
Libros, 1999, p. 679.
14. Gómez de la Serna, R., “Las palabras y lo indecible”, Revista de Occidente,
1936, 51, pp. 63 ff.
15. Gómez de la Serna, R., “Las coaas y ‘el ello”, Revista de Occidente, 1934,
45, p. 192.
16. Idem, p. 196.
17. Ortega y Gasset, J., “Ideas sobre la novela”, in Obras de José Ortega y
Gasset, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 1936 (2nd ed.), p. 105.
18. Idem, p. 1016.
19. Umbral, F., Ramón y las vanguardias, Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 1978, p. 172.
10. Montero Alonso, J., “‘Ya no escribiré más que greguerías’, dice Ramón
Gómez de la Serna en Buenos Aires”, ABC, 24-5-1962.
11. Pérez Ferrero, M., “Ramón y el primer Pombo”, (1946), Ramón en cuatro
entregas, exhibition catalogue, 2, Madrid, Museo Municipal, 1980, p. 51.
12. ABC, 9-9-1967.
13. Soto, M., “Visita a los trastos de Ramón”, Informaciones, 2-1-1968.
14. Buenos Aires, Sudamericana 1948, plate XXII.
15. Guilmain, A., “Ramón Gómez de la Serna”, Madrid, 19-2-1955.
16. Our thanks to Gladys Dalmau de Ghioldi, the writer’s daughter-in-law, for
the information she provided about the study.
17. Automoribundia, plate XV.
18. La sagrada cripta de Pombo, pp. 738, 742.
19. “Estantifermismo”, in Ismos (1931), Buenos Aires, Poseidón, 1947, p. 145.
20. “Las cosas y ‘el ello”, pp. 190-208.
21. Santiago, J. de, “Ramón nos habla de su ‘Automoribundia”, Arriba, 6.8-1948.
22. Gollerías, Valencia, Sempere, 1926, pp. 299-300.
23. Catalogue of the paintings. Museo Municipal de Madrid, Madrid,
Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1990, pp. 252, 278-279.
24. In La Sagrada cripta de Pombo the description of the study is illustrated
with abundant photographic material. The photographs in the ABC archive
are very interesting, as some show the married couple (no. 16.961, 3 and
5). We are grateful to the director, Javier Aguado, for allowing us to study
this material and consult the press clippings.
25. Bonet, J. M., “Introduction” to Ramón en cuatro entregas, exhibition
catalogue, 1.
26. Geist, A. L., La poética de la generación del 27 y las revistas literarias de la
vanguardia al compromiso: 1918-1936, Barcelona, Guadarrama, 1980, p. 60.
27. Cansinos Assens, R., La nueva literatura, Madrid, Páez, 1925, p. 372.
28. Nachón Riaño, María L., “El legado de Ramón Gómez de la Serna es pura
‘greguería”, Informaciones, 26-11-1966.
29. Arriba, 27-11-1966.
30. “El despacho de Ramón será instalado en la Hemeroteca Municipal”, ABC,
7-10-1967.
31. Pérez Ferrero, M., “Ramón, cuatro años”, ABC, 12-1-1967.
32. This material was torn off and destroyed, though the possibility of
preserving it or taking photographs of it was considered.
33. “Carta abierta al alcalde de Madrid”, Arriba, 16-10-1965.
34. According to his niece Susana Gómez de la Serna, the Plaza Mayor, which
Ramón enjoyed strolling around, was an ideal place for his books, and the
council had offered to set aside an area in this building (Informaciones, 7-71961)
35. “Ramón Gómez de la Serna tendrá un torreón y un monumento en Madrid.
En el Museo Municipal se instalará el despacho del escritor donado por su
viuda”, ABC, 24-3-1966; “El despacho bonaerense de Ramón y sus obras
serán adquiridos por el Ayuntamiento de Madrid”, ABC, 19-11-1966.
36. “Instalación del despacho de Gómez de la Serna”, ABC, 24-10-1967;
“Traslado del despacho de Gómez de la Serna, de Barcelona a Madrid”, ABC,
3-12-1967.
37. “El despacho de Ramón, en la Plaza Mayor”, ABC, 9-12-1967.
38. “El ‘despacho’ de Ramón Gómez de la Serna ya puede ser visitado”, ABC,
25-7-1972; Borrás, T., “El despacho de Ramón”, Villa de Madrid, 1972, 35-36,
pp. 70-72. Our thanks to the curator of the municipal collection, Isabel Tura,
for allowing us to study them.
39. Gómez de la Serna, R., Nuevos retratos contemporáneos y otros retratos,
Madrid, 1945.
40. Biografías de pintores (1928-1944), ed., I. Zlotescu, “Obras Completas”,
XVIII, Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg-Círculo de Lectores, 2001.
41. AM, p. 805 (Automoribundia, hereinafter the abbreviation will be used).
42. Gómez de la Serna, R., Pombo, Barcelona, Juventud, 1960, p. 222
43. El novelista, Valencia, Sempere, 1923, p. 390.
44. AM, pp. 641-642.
45. Guigon, E., Historia del collage en España, Teruel, Museo de Teruel, 1995.
46. AM, plate XIV.
47. Miquelarena, J., “Ramón Gómez de la Serna ha publicado su ‘Automoribundia”,
Ya, 20-8-1948; “Semblanza biogáfica”, ABC, 15-1-1963.
48. Caprichos, Barcelona, AHR, 1956, pp. 87-88
49. El novelista (1923), pp. 357-379, 382.
50. Nuevas páginas de mi vida (Lo que no dije en mi Automoribundia), Alcoy,
Marfin, 1957, p. 189.
51. El Rastro, ed. L. López Molina, Madrid, Espasa Calpa, 1998, p. 482.
52. Pérez Ferrero, M., “Ramón y el primer Pombo” (1946), Ramón en cuatro
entregas, exhibition catalogue, 2, p. 51.
53. In Automoribundia the author speaks at length on the pictures.
54. AM, p. 77.
55. Idem, p. 494. Young people’s rooms and students’ folders that display
heterogeneous tastes and where it is possible to find a singer or actor
beside a sportsman and a work of art recall the ancient practice of
constructing private universes.
56. Unpublished interview with Luisa Sofovich by Pedro Massa in August 1963
(ABC archive).
57. AM, p. 646.
58. Idem, pp. 494, 635, 641.
59. Camón Aznar refers to this as one of the constant features of his novels:
cohesion of remote images, tumultous delirium of metaphors, spectacle of
comparisons and inflamed realities…, Ramón Gómez de la Serna en sus
obras, Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 1976.
60. Ibid, p. 642
61. Nuevas páginas de mi vida (Lo que no dije en mi Automoribundia), pp. 33-41.
62. AM, plate XXV.
63. La sagrada cripta de Pombo, p. 711.
64. Caprichos, 1956, p. 81.
65. Ismos, 1947, p. 58. Among the cuttings on the study housed in the Museo
Municipal in Madrid is an extensive article on the artist: Carpeta de Ramón
Gómez de la Serna, no. 25.
66. Caprichos, 1956, p. 257.
67. Nuevas páginas de mi vida (Lo que no dije en mi automoribundia), pp. 157-159.
68. Biografías de pintores (1928-1944), “Obras Completas, p. 439.
69. La sagrada cripta de Pombo, pp. 665-668.
70. Hernani, J. de, “Ramón, entrevista en el ‘Urbasa”, El Correo Español, 23-4-1949.
71. Ramonismo II. Greguerías, Muestrario (1917-1919), ed. I. Zlotescu, “Obras
Completas”, IV, Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg-Círculo de Lectores, 1997, pp.
338, 750.
72. Gómez de la Serna, R., “Las dos Giocondas”, Prometeo, 1919, IV, pp. 81-83;
Gómez de la Serna, R., Greguerías, ed. R. Cardona, Madrid, Cátedra, 1993,
pp. 164, 248; Ramonismo, Madrid, Calpe, 1923, p. 59; Nuevas páginas de mi
vida (Lo que no dije en mi Automoribundia), p. 101; “La Gioconda y el
ladrón”, in Caprichos, 1956, pp. 95-96. Luisa Sofovich is the author of an
imaginary biography of the enigmatic woman.
73. Ávila, A., “El ‘ente plástico’: Gómez de la Serna-Gutiérrez Solana (A
propósito del maniquí)”, Anuario del Departamento de Historia y Teoría del
Arte (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), 2001, XIII, pp. 143-182.
74. Gómez de la Serna, R., Cinelandia, Madrid, Valdemar, 1995, pp. 142-143.
75. Pombo, p. 226.
76. Caprichos, 1956, p. 62.
77. AM, pp. 686-703.
78. Ramonismo, p. 177
179. La sagrada cripta de Pombo, p. 669. It stood beside a black idol, on a
shelf, in front of the portrait Rivera painted of him.
180. Idem, p. 522.
181. Gómez de la Serna, Greguerías, ed. R. Cardona, pp. 153, 248.
182. AM, p. 733.
183. Gómez de la Serna was not unaware of Jean Cocteau’s fondness of opium,
“the hardest drug to worm out”; when asked by the Spaniard whether he
had smoked this hallucinogen again, the author of Opium said he had not
but recognised that its perfume was unforgettable, saying that Picasso had
claimed that the three most powerful perfumes in life were opium, the
circus and harbours, Ismos, 1947, pp. 390, 392, 399.
184. AM, p. 641.
186. Pombo, Madrid, Comunidad de Madrid-Visor Libros, 1999, pp. 19, 20.
187. La sagrada cripta de Pombo, pp. 671-672.
188. El doctor inverosímil, pp. 265-272.
189. Revista de Occidente, 1935, 47, pp. 241-274.
190. Valencia, Sempere, 1926, pp. 259-262.
191. Nuevas páginas de mi vida (Lo que no dije en mi Automoribundia), pp. 20-21.
Chapter 7 is entitled “Truths of the heart”.
192. Muestrario, Madrid, Bibioteca Nueva, pp. 171-172 (Ramonismo II.
Greguerías, Muestrario (1917-1919), p. 569).
194. La sagrada cripta de Pombo, p. 720; ABC, 3-7-1962.
195. Gómez de la Serna, Greguerías, ed. R. Cardona, p. 128.
196. “Greguerías póstumas de Ramón”, ABC, 12-1-1964.
197. AM, pp. 131-134.
198. Idem, pp. 342-343. This expression was displayed by the pictures in the
form of a fan.
199. Gollerías, pp. 126-130.
100. El Rastro, pp. 182-185.
101. Gollerías, p. 150; Ramonismo II. Greguerías, Muestrario (1917-1919), p. 203
(a cat is mentioned in both). Gustavo also expresses his interest in stuffing
birds (El incongruente, p. 52)
102. Madrid, Castalia, 1997, pp. 121, 140, 153-159.
103. “Ensayo sobre las mariposas”, Revista de Occidente, 1932, 36, pp. 153-169.
104. Barcelona, Orbis, 1994, pp. 135-137.
105. Unpublished interview by Pedro Massa in August 1963 (ABC Archive).
106. AM, pp. 636-640.
107. Ramón speaks of a princess who is half mad and watered them every
morning waiting anxiously for their compact and transparent bulbs to
sprout shoots.
110. Gollerías, pp. 83-87.
112. Idem, pp. 702-703; AM, p. 384.
113. Ismos, 1947, p. 301.
114. La sagrada cripta de Pombo, pp. 670, 690, 691, 779-783.
115. “Las bolas de cristal”, in “Ensayos heterogéneos”, Revista de Occidente,
1933, 39, pp. 200-204.
116. AM, pp. 31-33, 95, 497.
117. “Los pescadores de esponjas”, Lateral, 1996, 24, pp. 1-2.
118. Gómez de la Serna, R., Greguerías selectas, Madrid, Calleja, 1919, p. 6.
483
A chat with Miliki
about the circus; that eternal, glorious, ineffable
circus that Ramón wrote about
Carlos Pérez
“It is the clowns that sustain the circus; and perhaps
“they sustain life, for our greatest consolation is that
“after our death, they may go on clowning around.”
“(Ramón Gómez de la Serna, El Circo, 1917)
In December 1923, a tribute was held for Ramón Gomez de la Serna at the Gran
Circo Americano in Madrid. Collaborating in this rather singular event were
Valentín Gutiérrez de Miguel, the tribute’s promoter, cartoonist Sancha, who drew
caricatures of the audience, Juan Pérez Zúñiga, who wrote the comic verses read
by the clown Thedy, and of course Ramón himself, who read his appreciation
speech perched on a trapeze overhead. It was without a doubt a well-deserved
show of support by performers and audience. In Madrid six years earlier Ramón—
who, in his own words, considered himself above all a circus writer—had brought
out El Circo. It was published by Imprenta Latina, with a cover by Salvador
Bartolozzi. Over time, the text came to be regarded as one of the most important,
best-documented works on what Phileas T. Barnum and James A. Bailey called
“The Greatest Show on Earth”. The book was well received and a second edition
was printed, published by Sempere in Valencia in 1926—with a cover by Bon
(Román Bonet) and illustrations by Apa (Feliu Elías) and Ramón himself. It was
also translated into French and published in Paris in 1927 by Simón Kra, who
printed five subsequent editions of the work.
As mentioned, the special performance staged in the ring of the Gran Circo
Americano boasted the very active participation of Thedy (Teodoro Aragón
Foureaux)—one of the members, along with his brothers Pompoff (Jose María) and
Emig (Emilio), of the renowned trio of Spanish clowns who in their time rivalled
the Fratellini Brothers—the equally famous comic troupe that, with the very
effective help of a musical saw and the shots of a starting gun, astounded
audiences of, as they say in the circus, “young and old, the world over”.
Emilio Aragón “Miliki”, the son of Emig and nephew of Pompoff and Thedy,
represents the third generation of one of the great circus families. Like his
predecessors, he has done everything in the circus. During their apprenticeship,
circus performers had to do everything— “everything except sell soft drinks”, as
the Fratellini were obliged to point out in their prologue to the French edition of
Ramón’s book. Thus it seemed very appropriate to interview Miliki for the circus
appendix of the exhibition. With him and his agent Mario Castiel, we went through
many pictures of various family members taken during many performances, TV
programmes, and ads, including a rather curious one published in France which
used a tour by Pompoff, Thedy and Emig to promote the excellent qualities of the
Hispano-Suiza motorcar. You might say that we discovered that this car—the same
car that instilled the Futurist Marinetti with such enthusiasm—occasionally needed
comic support.
—Ramón always held the Pompoff-Thedhy-Emig trio in high regard. Perhaps
because of this, when he added a chapter dedicated to historic acts in the second
edition of El Circo, he said they were: “Clowns with terrific personalities, shining
with good humour. Joke improvisers and spontaneous orators; in short, the Clowns
of Granada.”
484
—I think that Ramón sensed what Pompoff, Thedy and Emig would become. That
brilliant trio were a success all over Europe, Latin America, and North America.
They were the best example of the true Spanish clown. Their creativity and
personality made them unforgettable. My great friend José Mario Armero referred
to them as the aristocracy of the circus. They created a school of followers that
remains to this day.
—According to Julio Gómez de la Serna, his brother Ramón stubbornly insisted on
injecting pure circus humour into life and literature. His work displays a propensity
to “assassinate the ridiculous, return to the primitive state of the world, invoke the
haughty and solemn which is the transcendental mission of the clown; of the
eccentric”.
—What Ramón intended was for us to be able to laugh at ourselves. This was
utopian in a Spain dominated by complexes and marked by social differences.
—In the early years of the twentieth century, circus performers—and impresarios
including the successors of the legendary Barnum such as Bailey, Shumann and
the Ringlings—were very well known professionals, and as well regarded and
honoured as the great stars of theatre and cinema, which was just beginning to
stammer on to the scene. In an article about circus posters, Ramón wrote that he
had one hanging in the corridor of his home which showed “a man wearing more
medals than any Napoleon ever had.”
—The three most important types of spectacle in Europe in those days were: the
circus, the ballet, and the opera. Thus its main characters, impresarios and
performers alike, were the stars of the day. For example, a trapeze artist named
Leotard made his waist-high stockings fashionable, and they came to be called
leotards. This type of stocking was used, as continues to be used, by women the
world over. And they are still called leotards.
—The images in posters sought to depict the exotic magic of the circus. From Jules
Chéret and Toulouse-Lautrec, in the last decades of the 19th century, through the
nineteen fifties, a school of poster painting, largely at the hand of anonymous
artists, emerged which exerted an influence on both modern artists and commercial
advertising.
—Actually, the influence of these circus posters can be seen even today. Record
companies still use circus-style street posters. Spain boasted brilliant circus
poster printers and artists such as Luchi and Ardavín. There were excellent
lithographs in Valencia and this is also where the circus tents were made by a well
known nautical sail maker who, following the decline of sailboat transportation,
was clever enough to find a new outlet for his company’s activity.
—Ramón’s “performances” derived from the circus, as in his readings of his works
astride an elephant at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, or his conference on the “Knight
with Hand on Breast”, where he had the knight raise and lower his hand by means
of a simple mechanism. Ramón’s humour sought to establish a link between art and
literature.
—This is what I heard in family conversations on several occasions. I think that
Ramón attempted to bring art and literature together by means of comedy that
was intuitive, expressive, and spontaneous. The comedy of the great circus
clowns.
—When the French edition of El Circo, appeared, the German writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote a critique in which he pointed out that in works such
as Ramón’s, the circus was beginning to be investigated because of the great
artistic scope of “the inexpensive show that attracts audiences of all sorts”. In fact,
the theme of the circus interested many avant-garde writers and artists. It can be
said that most of them tried to interpret the spectacle’s colour, movement, “joie de
vivre”, and fascinating ambience. Predominating after the end of the Second World
War were the anecdote, the decadent romanticism, and the circus tragedy, although
it is not clear whether or not this was simply a cliché.
—At the end of the 19th century and during the first forty years of the twentieth
century, the influence of the circus not only captivated important writers, painters,
and sculptors. It also, especially owing the equestrian interest, caught the attention
of European royal households, to the point where charity performances were held
with members of these families performing on horseback. As for the “tragedy”, if my
memory serves me well, it was Dickens who put the tear on the clown’s face.
—The circus in its moment of splendour played an important role in the dissemination of different cultures. Thus, the audience would be exposed to, for example,
the popular music of other countries: the rhythms of Ragtime and the Charleston
were imported from America. I don’t think it’s possible to conceive of the circus
without the music, which was, according to Ramón, “violent, fervent, awkward,
defiant, and admirable”.
—Circus music was overwhelming. The great circus tunes and marches have
come down to us today. In those years, the orchestras that accompanied standing
circuses were as large as symphony orchestras. I had the privilege of performing
at the Coliseo Balear in Majorca and the Coliseo dos Recreios at Lisbon with an
orchestra of forty musicians. More recently, the Circo del Arte that this family
established had a live orchestra with sixteen musicians and original musical
scores. The Cirque du Soleil currently stages its performances with marvellous
live music.
—It is clear that between 1900 and 1930, there were few differences in the circus
acts that were performed internationally. Your father Emig, for example, played a
bellboy in blackface in the manner of the American minstrels. This was a time when
vaudeville, the backstage of the carnivals—“the clearance sales of the circus” as
Ramón used to say—and the wandering jugglers who played in towns and cities,
had much in common with the circus.
—It is true that for commercial reasons, everything would sometimes be mixed up
together. Thus, what was known as Variety, which was directly related to burlesque, eventually became merged with circus acts. And then, there were performers
such as Grock, a mute clown who communicated better with audiences from the
stage of a theatre than from the circus ring. This was also the case with Charlie
Rivel at the beginning of his second artistic stage; his first stage having been
limited to imitations of The Little Tramp. My father, whose bellboy character
originated in Cuba, brought Josephine Baker to the Spanish stage, and my uncle
Thedy performed very funny parodies of this famous singer and dancer in the
circus ring. Everything in fact became mixed up together, and since the decline of
the circus and the rise of television, a show might include circus acts and
performances by singers and dancers. Television’s famous Ed Sullivan Show
always included circus acts. My brothers and I brought circus to television. It’s
odd, but the acts of this type which received the most applause were the circus
acts; especially the jugglers and tightrope walkers.
—Ramón admired the silent films starring Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry
Langdon and Charlie Chaplin. He was particularly intrigued by The Little Tramp, the
character portrayed by the latter, and even wrote an opera about him, though it was
never staged. All of these performers originated in the circus and their type of
comedy was similar to Ramón’s and the clowns who carried on his work in the ring.
Over time, this manner of extracting laughs, based on gags and the absurdity of the
everyday incident, became lost. You might say that, not only in the circus, but also
in film, following the disappearance of actors such as W.C. Fields and Jimmy
Durante, a plague of imitators eventually overwhelmed the original creators.
—Of those mentioned, I had the pleasure of sharing a stage with Buster Keaton
for several months. I also spent a few unforgettable hours with Jimmy Durante.
They were all influenced by circus comedy, and they all adored the immortal show.
I think the decline began mainly with the imitations, with the lack of expressionism
that started with the storytellers of Stand Up Comedy.
—Well, I was referring specifically to the parody comics that have sprouted up like
a veritable legion and who seem more like amateurs than actors.
—It’s true, but as I said, as a continuation of the spoken tradition, they rely mainly
on words. I think that expression and gesture has been lost.
—Buster Keaton wrote in his memoirs that in lieu of a formal education, he received
the best of extra-scholastic educations. His mother taught him how to read, write,
and add up; Bill “Bojangles” Robinson taught him tap-dancing; Herb Williams gave
him piano lessons and Houdini showed him the secrets of several hand tricks. This
unorthodox education was, at times, more useful than that which was taught in the
illustrious schools and colleges.
—A circus education was familiarly called the “travelling degree”. That is to say, the
culture acquired through familiarisation with other cultures and peoples, together
with the rehearsals in the ring that determine the performer’s future. My father was
an exceptional case. He was the only one of his fifteen brothers to attend
secondary school—at a boarding school in Ghent—and did not join the circus until
he had finished. Everyone in the family spoke several languages—I don’t know if
they could write them as well—and enjoyed that broad culture you acquire through
travel. In any case, I don’t think extremes are a good thing and a normal education
is necessary. You cannot ignore all other knowledge just to become brilliant in one
subject. I spoke at length about this with Pau Casals, whose mother forced him
to study the cello from a very early age.
—Perhaps because of this, circus acts—in an honest, well-lit setting, to quote Ramón—provided an unusual pedagogical environment which comprised unorthodox
notions of geography, anatomy, physics, and most importantly, a different way of
looking at the world, disassociated from repetitive, futile confrontations. In his tribute, Ramón stated that: “The dreamt-of universal peace will be signed at a great
circus, one of these nights, where all flags will wave in true brotherhood on a tall
flagpole made of acrobats standing on each other’s backs.”
—All religions, races, and ways of thinking have coexisted in the circus. Tolerance
is a part of the circus way of life. The Muslim Ramadan was just as respected as
everyone else’s individual social ideas. Circus performers were convinced that art
could unite men and improve human relations.
—In the epilogue to El Circo, Ramón includes a long list of unique and incomparable—to use circus jargon—performers. These included, to name just a few, La
Bella López, Stanley, Nieves Alonso, Búfalo Maciste, Fabra, the Baldó, Agustín and
Hartley trio, the Pompoff-Thedy-Emig trio, Béby, Seiffert, The Perezoffs and The
Great Carmo. He also wrote about the impresarios William Parish and Tomás Price.
It would seem that they were indeed unique and incomparable, because everything
was different after them.
—These names symbolised the Great Age of the Circus. I knew several of the
families mentioned. William Parish married Tomás Price’s adopted daughter. He
built a circus in Madrid’s Plaza del Rey and named it the Price Circus, after his
father-in-law.
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—The circus is full of family and sibling troupes. One example of this is the case of
Willy Frediani—mentioned by Sebastià Gasch in his book El circo y sus figuras—
who married the equestrian performer Bugny de Brailly. Their child, Nani, married
the tightrope walker Virginia Aragón. At the time of his death, Willy Fredian was the
father of nine children who had settled in Tangiers, Glasgow and different areas of
Italy, and was, according to the Catalonian writer, succeeded by twenty-two
grandchildren who would also undoubtedly become “circus performers in their day”.
These very international families assured the continuance of the spectacle.
—The spectacle of the circus was continually nourished by families that were akin
to dynasties. These illustrious family names are renowned in circus circles the
world over. There is a mistake in Sebastià Gasch’s book. Nani Frediani did not
marry Virginia Aragón, my aunt. He married Mercedes Guerra Aragón, Virginia’s
daughter. The Frediani family eventually settled in Spain. Nearly all of Willy’s
grandchildren were great performers. One of them, Xandro, plays a character in
my current television series, entitled Trilocos.
—It was precisely the cosmopolitan nature of these many families that made it
possible for a performer to work as a Hungarian juggler one season and a Russian
acrobat the next. On this subject, Ramón mentions the Perezoffs as: “The Pérez
family, who had a tradition of comic performance, and performed like Russians in
the world’s rings. Their name has patriotic value here, for Madrid is the true home
of these false Muscovites”. On the Trío Baldó he wrote: “A trio of Arabs, who are not
Arabs, except in that, as a Spanish politician secretly said, “what really happened is
that we threw out all the Christians and only we Arabs were left.”
—Normally, each family name would be associated with a particular type of act,
although some members of the family might try out different types of act. The Knie
family were, and still are, animal trainers. The Loyals; equestrian performers and
acrobats. The Perezoffs are jugglers. The Aragóns are clowns, like the Fratellinis
and the Díaz brothers from Valencia.
—Eventually the standing circuses closed and the touring circuses no longer kept
their annual rendezvous. The spectacle, as it was conceived from its origins, began
to wane. Audiences lost contact with that eternal, glorious, ineffable circus that
Ramón wrote about.
—The Aragón, Feijóo, Corzana, Romero, Cortés, Álvarez, Parish, Sánchez Rexach,
and other families deeply loved the circus and all that it stood for. Whatever they
earned from the circus, they reinvested in the circus. Without generalising, the
nineteen forties saw the emergence of a generation of speculator impresarios,
mostly carnival men, who transformed the circus into a money-making machine
and led this noble spectacle onto the sad path of poverty where it remains today.
Especially its image in Spain.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna:
an attempted chronology
Juan Manuel Bonet
1888
He was born in Madrid on 3 July at Calle de las Rejas, 5, today Calle
Guillermo Rolland, 7, located alongside the Senate building. He was
christened in the Parish of San Martín. His father, the lawyer Javier Gómez de la
Serna, at that time a senior civil servant at the Ministry for Overseas Affairs,
belonged to a family of jurists and liberal politicians that owned an ancestral home
in Castilruiz in the Province of Soria. His mother, Josefa Puig Coronado, was the
niece of the Extremaduran Romantic poet Carolina Coronado. They had married
in the autumn of 1887.
1890
The Gómez de la Serna family moved to Calle Mayor, 79.
1896
The Gómez de la Serna family moved to La Corredera Baja de San
Pablo, 17. Along with his brother, José, he attended the School of El Niño
Jesús, located in the same street. Among his fellow students, he would later
mention Fernando and Francisco Calleja in Automoribundia.
1898
After Spain lost Cuba and the Philippines, Javier Gómez de la Serna was
dismissed from the Ministry for Overseas Affairs, moving his family to the
town of Frechilla in Palencia, where he was appointed registrar of deeds. Ramón
and his brother José became boarders at the religious Piarist School of San
Isidoro in Palencia, where they were “as wretched and orphan-like as one is at a
boarding school”, and where he would study alongside the future poet—“the ninth
Spanish poet”, as he would call him—and future member of the literary circle at the
Café de Pombo, Francisco Vighi.
1900
After his father was elected member of parliament for Hinojosa del
Duque (Córdoba), requesting leave as a registrar, the Gómez de la Serna
family returned to Madrid, setting up home at number 35-37 in Calle de
Fuencarral. He continued his schooling, along with his brother José, first at the
Piarist School of San Antón, and later at the School of Cardenal Cisneros, where
he was a fellow pupil of Ricardo Baeza.
1902
He launched El Postal, a “magazine to defend the rights of students”, a
self-illustrated affair, that had a duplicated print-run of 25 copies, on
which Ramos de Castro collaborated: “the jelly newspaper, difficult,
heartbreaking, featuring all the pain of teething”.
1903
The family Gómez de la Serna moved to Calle de la Puebla, where
Ramón would live until 1918, and where he would begin to build his first
literary study: “I am preparing my first study with things from El Rastro, with
plaster reproductions and a marble fireplace on which I place my own logs”. As a
reward for having completed his secondary-school studies, he travelled for the
first time to Paris. He began his studies at the Faculty of Law, where he was a
fellow student of Baeza and Francisco Martínez Corbalán.
1904
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He began to frequent the cultural association of Madrid, the Ateneo. His
second uncle, Andrés García de la Barga y Gómez de la Serna, who
would in future be known as “Corpus Barga”, published Cantares, his first book.
In 1904 or 1905, he discovered the paintings by José Gutiérrez Solana at the
Fine Arts Circle of Madrid, the Círculo de Bellas Artes.
1905
He worked on the Republican radical newspaper La Región Extremeña,
on El Adelantado de Segovia and on other regional newspapers. Carolina Coronado wrote to her brother Alejandro, attacking the “printed nonsense” of
her nephew. Ramón published his first book, Entrando en fuego, subtitled “The
holy concerns of a schoolboy”, in which he announced the publication of Plus
Ultra, a magazine that would never see the light.
1906
His mother died.
1908
He published Morbideces, for which a banquet was organised in his
honour at La Bombilla, alongside the River Manzanares, presided over by
Manuel Ciges Aparicio and featuring the participation of Julio Antonio and
Eugenio Noel, two of his first literary friends. He completed his law studies in
Oviedo, where he was a fellow student of Guillermo Castañón and Eduardo M.
Torner, among others, and where he courted María Jove. His father founded
Prometeo, a magazine that, in practice, Ramón would end up managing. The
magazine published Aloysius Bertrand, Colette, Paul Fort, Remy de Gourmont,
Francis Jammes, Lautréamont, Jean Lorrain, Maurice Maeterlinck, Camille
Mauclair, Rachilde, Georges Rodenbach, Saint-Pol Roux, Marcel Schwob,
Laurent Tailhade and other “strange” French and Belgian writers, as well as
Gabriele d’Annunzio and Giovanni Papini, Thomas de Quincey, G.B. Shaw,
Swinburne, Arthur Symons, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, the Portuguese
writer Eugénio de Castro, the Brazilian Olavo Bilac, not to mention Manuel Abril,
Ricardo Baeza, Ramón de Basterra, Joaquín Belda, Carmen de Burgos, Rafael
Cansinos-Asséns, Emilio Carrere, Juan Díaz-Caneja, Enrique Díez-Canedo,
Fernando Fortún, José Francés, Federico García Sanchiz, José García Vela,
Andrés González Blanco, Ramón Goy de Silva, Nicasio Hernández Luquero,
Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, Prudencio Iglesias Hermida, Juan Ramón Jiménez,
Silverio Lanza, Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Rafael Leyda, Gabriel Miró, Tomás
Morales, Gonzalo Morenas de Tejada, Eugenio Noel, José Ortiz de Pinedo,
Alonso Quesada, Emiliano Ramírez Ángel, Cipriano Rivas Cherif, Luis Ruiz
Contreras, Pedro Salinas, José Sánchez Rojas, Rafael Urbano, Ángel Vegue y
Goldoni and Francisco Villaespesa, among others.
1909
He began a romantic affair, which would last for many years, with the
writer Carmen de Burgos, “Colombine”, who he had met the previous
year. In Prometeo he published his translation of the “Futurist Manifesto” by F.T.
Marinetti, which had appeared slightly earlier in Le Figaro in Paris, along with his
plays La utopía and Beatriz. As the recently elected Secretary of the Literature
Section of the Ateneo in Madrid, he read and later published in Prometeo a
paper on the concept of new literature, El concepto de la nueva literatura.
During this session at the Ateneo, he met Silverio Lanza, whom he would
frequently visit at his home in Getafe. On 24 March at the Café de Fornos, with
invitations designed by Julio Antonio, he organised a banquet for Mariano José de
Larra: “Larra is with us”. He began a stay in Paris, at the Hotel de Suez, as the
Secretary of the Pensions Board, a trip that would extend until 1911, interspersed
with trips to Great Britain—he spent Christmas of that year in London, “a peaceful,
credulous London, with its amber-coloured fog, lit up by yellow alabaster streetlamps in which the light of the sun burnt”, in the company of Carmen de Burgos,
who had visited him in the French capital—Italy and Switzerland. In Paris he saw
Pío Baroja, Manuel Ciges Aparicio and Corpus Barga, among others, and met—
“around 1912”, he would later say—Rémy de Gourmont.
1910
He published El libro mudo—with epilogues by Silverio Lanza and Juan
Ramón Jiménez—and Sur del renacimiento escultórico español, a
text inspired by the artistic universe of Julio Antonio. He began his “Diálogos
triviales” (“Trivial Dialogues”) at the Café de Sevilla and published them later in
the magazine, in which he also published his play El laberinto, his pantomime
La bailarina and the two only poems he published, “Post-scriptum”—“that begins
with the following verse: “I also write poetry in secret”— and “Nieve tardía”, the
latter dedicated to Juan Ramón Jiménez. In Prometeo, as always, the “Futurist
Proclamation to the Spanish” appeared, written for the occasion by Marinetti,
preceded by his own preliminary declaration. He was appointed Vice-President of
the Teatro de Ensayo. As he stated in Ismos, in that year he discovered Cubist
painting at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, an exhibition he entered “by
coincidence”: “from that moment on I entered the feverish chaos of modern
painting and its interests”.
1911
He published Ex-Votos. His comedy Los sonámbulos appeared in
Prometeo. Through his father’s influence, he was appointed an expert
clerk at the Prosecutor’s Office at the Supreme Court, a position he would retain
up until the time of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
1912
He produced his “greguerías”—brief, humorous and mildly poetic
aphorisms on life. Thanks to Tomás Borrás he began to work on a new
Madrid newspaper, La Tribuna, where he published his first “greguerías”. A
Banquet to Spring was held at La Bombilla. After 38 issues, Prometeo
disappeared, the publication in which he published his plays El teatro en
soledad and El lunático. Silverio Lanza died. He began to frequent the Café y
Botillería de Pombo in Calle Carretas.
1913
He published Tapices, with a cover designed by Salvador Bartolozzi, and
his first short story, El ruso, featuring illustrations by the same painter. He
wrote the prologue to The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin, with an essay
entitled “Ruskin the Passionate”.
1914
He published El Rastro, one of his main books, featuring a cover by
Salvador Bartolozzi, and to which Diego Rivera would dedicate a still-life
the following year, and his short story El doctor inverosímil.
1915
He founded the Saturday literary circle “Pombo”; the other founding
members included, according to the “First Pombo Proclamation”, Manuel
Abril, Luis Bagaría, Salvador Bartolozzi, José Bergamín, his brother the architect
Rafael Bergamín—who designed its emblem—Tomás Borrás, José Cabrero, Rafael
Calleja, Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, the waiter Pepe Cerezo, José Gutiérrez Solana,
Gustavo de Maeztu, Diego Rivera and Rafael Romero Calvet, “the other Dürer”.
He wrote the prologue for the catalogue of the exhibition staged by the Pintores
Íntegros, whose participants included the caricaturist Luis Bagaría, the painters
María Blanchard—“a marvellous witch-like girl”—and Diego Rivera, and a sculptor,
Agustín “El Choco”, Julio Antonio’s assistant. His Cubist portrait produced by
Rivera created a great scandal when included in the exhibition. He spent some
time with Marie Laurencin and the modiste Nicole Groult, as well as Jacques
Lipchitz, with whom he shared a passion for African masks. In Bilbao he delivered
an address on humourism. He undertook his first trip to Portugal: a discovery he
marvelled about in the letters he sent back to the members of Pombo: “In Lisbon,
487
in which one can once again experience the first breakfast of the world, I am at
last happy, and I find here something of the promised land”. He also wrote:
“Portugal is a window to a brighter place, towards a more abundant beyond”.
1916
He wrote the prologue to Confidencias de artistas by Carmen de Burgos,
for whose book Peregrinaciones he wrote the epilogue. The Chilean poet
Vicente Huidobro, who was visiting Madrid for the first time, attended Pombo on
his way to Paris. Ramón travelled to Switzerland.
1917
He published Greguerías—with a chequered cover based on “Jean”
cigarette paper—Senos and El circo. He produced articles on the work
of Azorín and José María Salaverría, both in ABC. He travelled to Paris and
planned the lithographic album París 1917, for which Angelina Beloff, Juan Gris,
Lipchitz, Marevna, Picasso, Diego Rivera and the Mexican Ángel Zárraga
produced originals, various of whom he had just met. He also met Guillaume
Apollinaire, Ilya Ehrenburg, Modigliani and the Chilean Manuel Ortiz de Zárate. He
visited Italy, where he attended—in Florence—a Futurist theatre festival. A banquet
was organised at Pombo for Picasso, who was in Madrid for the performance of
Erik Satie’s Parade by the Ballets Russes with his sets and costume designs, at
the Teatro Real.
1918
He published Pombo—the first of his two books on the café, which
sported a black cover by Romero Calvet, and in which he included his
letters from Paris, Italy and Lisbon to the members of Pombo—Senos and
Muestrario. He ordered and produced a prologue for the anthology Páginas
escogidas e inéditas by Silverio Lanza. He wrote the prologue for The Portrait of
Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. A banquet at Pombo was organised for Tomás
Borrás, Conrado del Campo and Ángel Barrios to mark the première of El
Avapiés. A double banquet for Ramón for his books, at Pombo on the first
occasion, and the following day, at a cheaper event, at El Púlpito. At Pombo he
met Valéry Larbaud, then residing in Alicante, who from that moment on would
become his main supporter in France. An article about Ramón was published by
Alfonso Reyes in Hispania in Paris. He moved to Calle de María de Molina, 44.
1919
He published Greguerías selectas—with a prologue by Rafael Calleja—
and El Paseo del Prado. He produced the prologue for Las hijas del
fuego by Gérard de Nerval, Muñecas by Théodore de Banville, Nuevos cuentos
crueles and La Eva futura by Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Lord Arthur Savile’s
Crime by Oscar Wilde. Ultraísmo was born, a movement promoted from its base
at the Café Colonial by his old friend and now rival Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, and
also headed by the Pombo member Guillermo de Torre, with whom his relations
were not always problem-free—“for me the X-rays and lyrical aeroplanes arrived
very late”, he was to claim in Automoribundia—in spite of which he collaborated
on various of the movement’s magazines, including Ultra in Madrid. Valéry
Larbaud published an article on him in the Dadaist magazine Littérature,
accompanied by a selection of his humorous aphorisms. He wrote a text on
Francisco Iturrino for a collective book on Basque art. Julio Antonio died; Ramón
wrote his obituary: “we left him there, on that muddy field, as if stretched out on
the earth”.
1920
He published Libro nuevo. He wrote the epilogue for Fígaro, the book
by Carmen de Burgos on Mariano José de Larra; the text was published
on its own as El Paseo del Prado. He wrote the epilogue for a volume of
selected prose, Prosa escogida, by Charles Baudelaire, and wrote the prologue
for El amor imposible by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Los cantos de Maldoror by
488
Lautréamont and Una noche en el Luxemburgo by Remy de Gourmont. A
banquet was organised in honour of all Pombo’s members. After having been
exhibited at the Salón de Otoño (Autumn Exhibition) on 17 December, the Pombo
set in pride of place the masterly painting—today the property of the Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía—dedicated to him by José Gutiérrez Solana,
in which, alongside Ramón and the painter, we can see Manuel Abril, Mauricio
Bacarisse, Salvador Bartolozzi, José Bergamín, Tomás Borrás, José Cabrero and
the Venezuelan Pedro-Emilio Coll. The “Poema truncado de Madrid” by Alonso
Quesada appeared in various issues of España, in which Ramón appears
officiating at Pombo. He collaborated on the ultraísta magazine Reflector.
1921
He published Disparates, Toda la historia de la Puerta del Sol y
otras muchas cosa, a compilation of articles that had appeared in the
newspaper La Tribuna throughout the previous year, his novels La viuda blanca
y negra—“written during a Madrid summer with all the obsession of crime,
jealousy and the sleepless and fiesta-infused air”—and El doctor inverosímil,
and his short stories El miedo al mar, La tormenta and Leopoldo y Teresa.
A Pombo banquet was held in honour of José Gutiérrez Solana to mark the
appearance of La España negra. He was one of the speakers at the banquet held
in honour of Francisco Grandmontagne that took place at La Posada del
Segoviano. He was one of the Spanish writers interviewed by the Peruvian
Alberto Guillén in La linterna de Diógenes. He appeared in the “Avant-Garde
Directory” created by Actual, the mural magazine produced by Manuel Maples
Arce that marked the beginning of Mexican “estridentismo”. Alfonso Reyes
published an article about him in México Moderno. Cansinos-Asséns included a
character inspired by him in his coded novel El Movimiento V.P.
1922
His father died. He published his novels El gran hotel and El
incongruente, Variaciones, and his short stories La gangosa, El olor
de las mimosas and La hija del verano. He set up home in the turret in Calle
Velázquez. Pombo banquets were organised for José Ortega y Gasset, Enrique
Díez-Canedo, and Don Nadie, during which a letter from Unamuno was read. He
attended the Cante Jondo (flamenco) Competition in Granada organised by
Manuel de Falla and Federico García Lorca. He collaborated on an issue of the
magazine Intentions of Paris in homage to Valéry Larbaud. Yvan Goll included him
in his international anthology Les Cinq continents. In Spain he published an article
on the Monument to the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin.
1923
He published El alba y otras cosas, Ramonismo, his novels
Cinelandia, El secreto del acueducto—as the title indicates, based on
a Segovian theme—El novelista, El chalet de las rosas (et in Ciudad Lineal in
Madrid) and La Quinta de Palmyra, his “Portuguese symphony” (Valéry
Larbaud), previewed that same year in La Pluma, and his short stories El joven
de las sobremesas, La saturada, El mestizo and La malicia de las acacias.
Valéry Larbaud wrote a prologue—“when we travel and arrive in a city at daybreak,
we imagine Ramón’s lighted window at dawn, there in Madrid, like a ship’s light
on the prow of Europe”—for a selection of his works translated by Mathilde Pomès
under the title Echantillons. To mark the publication of this book a banquet was
organised at the Cercle Littéraire International of Paris, featuring a toast offered
by Daniel Halévy. In La Revue Hebdomadaire, Larbaud also published an article
entitled “Ramón Gómez de la Serna et la littérature espagnole contemporaine”.
During this visit to Paris he met Jules Supervielle—“from my last visit to Paris, the
most lively memory is of this great and unexpected man”—and he visited the studio
of the Delaunay, where Robert painted his portrait and he drew a “Fan of Words
for Sonia Delaunay”, a calligrammatic piece, and where he met Jean Cocteau and
Tristan Tzara. He wrote the prologue for Bazar by the Argentinian Francisco Luis
Bernárdez, and Química del espíritu by the Argentinian-influenced Peruvian Alberto Hidalgo, with regard to which he talked about “spiritual grasshopperism”
(“saltamontismo espiritual”). He began to contribute to El Sol—where he reviewed
Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía by Oliverio Girondo, who would
shortly visit him—and to the Revista de Occidente. He gave an address to mark
the solo exhibition in Madrid by Gustavo de Maeztu. He gave an address in Gijón
on street-lamps, presented by José Díaz Fernández. He gave an address, seated
on a trapeze, at the Gran Circo Americano (“Great American Circus”) in Madrid,
to mark his appointment as the Official Circus Chronicler. He was accorded a
double banquet in his honour, a lavish affair at Lhardy, featuring the participation
of Azorín and Vighi, and a more demotic affair at El Oro del Rhin, held by younger
friends, among them several ultraístas, including the participation of Juan
Gutiérrez Gili. At Pombo a “banquet of physiognomies and types of the age” was
organised, along with another for Valéry Larbaud. A banquet was organised for
Luis Bagaría at the Hotel Palace. Melchor Fernández Almagro published an article
“La generación unipersonal de Gómez de la Serna” (“The Unipersonal Generation
of Gómez de la Serna”) in España. Guillermo de Torre dedicated a poem in
Hélices to him. Without wishing to, he provided the Peruvian poet, César Moro,
with a pseudonym.
1924
He set up home in Estoril, where he began to build “El Ventanal”. He
published La sagrada cripta de Pombo—which included “Mi
autobiografía”, and would be reviewed by Borges in Inicial and Martín Fierro, as
well as three children’s stories illustrated by Rafael Barradas, En el bazar más
suntuoso del mundo, El marquesito en el circo and Por los tejados, his
short stories Aquella novela, El vegetariano and De otra raza. He wrote the
prologue for Querido by Colette, El vellocino de oro by Jean de Gourmont and
El poeta asesinado by Guillaume Apollinaire, in a translation by Cansinos-Asséns.
He contributed 18 humorous aphorisms to El archipiélago de la muñequería, “a
novel in colours” by Antoniorrobles. Seins appeared in French, with illustrations
by Pierre Bonnard. A controversy broke out, in this respect, with Nathalie Clifford
Barney, “the Amazonian” of Remy de Gourmont. He reviewed Fervor de Buenos
Aires (1923), the first book of poems by Jorge Luis Borges, in Revista de
Occidente. Valéry Larbaud published an article on him in La Revue Européenne.
Gerardo Diego dedicated a poem from Manual de espumas to him. Jean Cassou
devoted a biographical sketch to him in Nouvelle Revue Française, where he
described him “as a brother of Jean Giraudoux and of Max Jacob”. Benjamín
Jarnés published in Proa his article entitled “Los tres Ramones” (“The Three
Ramóns”). He proposed producing a summary of the Spanish issue of Intentions.
He appeared among the promoters of a posthumous anthology of the poetic work
of the ultraísta José de Ciria y Escalante. He collaborated on Tableros, where he
published a text on Charlie Chaplin, and on Ronsel in Lugo. “Le charlotisme” was
translated for Le Disque Vert in Brussels.
1925
He published Caprichos and his short stories La fúnebre, ¡Hay que
matar al morse!, El inencontrable and La virgen pintada de rojo.
He wrote the prologue for Il y a, a posthumous and miscellaneous work by
Guillaume Apollinaire. Ortega y Gasset referred to his work in La deshumanización del arte, comparing it to that of Marcel Proust and James Joyce. He
collaborated on a monographic issue about Lautréamont for Le Disque Vert, an
issue which Paul Eluard would rail against in the pages of La Révolution
Surréaliste. The magazine Martín Fierro of Buenos Aires published an orange
welcome page to Ramón as a supplement, to mark a trip to Argentina that did not
take place in the end, as indicated in the note at the beginning; in addition to
Ramón himself, this featured the collaboration of Francisco Luis Bernárdez,
Borges, Brandán Caraffa, Arturo Cancela, Macedonio Fernández—who would call
him “a Creole from over there”, and with whom he would maintain a correspondence in the following years—Oliverio Girondo (who also produced a spectacular
allegorical drawing), Ricardo Güiraldes, Alberto Hidalgo, Evar Méndez, Sergio
Piñero junior and the architect Alberto Prebisch. Girondo dedicated his poem
“Calle de las Sierpes” from Calcomanías to him, and Jules Supervielle dedicated
another poem to him from Gravitations.
1926
He published Gollerías, Greguerías escogidas, his novel El torero
Caracho, and under the title El drama del palacio deshabitado, a
volume, whose cover recovered a drawing by Julio Antonio that brought together
his theatre works from the Prometeo period. He wrote the prologue for Maelstrom by the Guatemalan Luis Cardoza y Aragón. Valéry Larbaud, in his “Lettre de
Lisbone à quelques amis”, published in Nouvelle Revue Française, made
reference to his meeting with the writer in Lisbon, Ramón being one of the
speakers at the banquet organised in honour of the Frenchman: “Ramón, who I
had believed to be completely isolated in Portugal, was, on the contrary, at the
centre of a group of young avant-garde writers”. He left Estoril for good, moving
his home to Naples—“the light in Naples is the best that I have experienced in my
life and I will always believe that this is the most ideal corner of the world”, he was
to write in Automoribundia; concerning Ramón’s stay in Italy, Rafael Sánchez
Mazas published his article “Ramón in the Hesperides” in ABC. Massimo
Bontempelli included him, along with James Joyce, Georg Kaiser and Pierre Mac
Orlan, on the editing board of 900, the quarterly “Cahiers d’Italie et d’Europe” that
he founded with Curzio Malaparte and his publisher La Voce; the first issue
featured, in a translation by Mario da Silva, a few “Fantasmagories”.
1927
He published Las 636 mejores greguerías, his compilations of short
stories Seis falsas novelas and La malicia de las acacias; La mujer
de ámbar, a novel inspired by Naples, and his short story El hijo del
millonario. The appearance in French of Le cirque, produced by the publisher
Kra in Paris, led to a commentary by Walter Benjamin in the Internationale Revue
of Amsterdam. A Pombo banquet was held for Azorín. La Gaceta Literaria
appeared, directed by Ernesto Giménez Caballero, for whom that year he
reviewed Los toros, las castañuelas y la Virgen in Revista de Occidente, and with
whom he had maintained an intense correspondence in the preceding months; in
these letters he wrote about Almada Negreiros—for whom he organised a homage
at Pombo—and Ilya Ehrenburg, among others. He collaborated on a drawing for
the first issue of Papel de Aleluyas in Huelva. In Revista de Occidente he
published a “Requiem for Güiraldes”. On 15 September the false news of his
death spread, to which he reacted by renaming his section “Horario” in El Sol
“Osario”. A conference on Goya took place in Huesca, presented by Ramón Acín.
He collaborated on La Rosa de los Vientos of Tenerife. Fernando Villegas Estrada
included his portrait in verse in Café romántico y otros poemas.
1928
He published Goya, his leaflet Goya y la ribera del Manzanares, his
novel El caballero del hongro gris, his compilation of short stories El
dueño del átomo, and his short stories La roja and La hiperestésica. He
wrote the prologue for Metro: Greguerías autorizadas by Alfonso Jiménez Aquino.
He collaborated on Almanaque de las artes y las letras para 1928 by Gabriel
García Maroto. Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote his “lyrical caricature”, published years
later in Españoles de tres mundos. Revista de Avance in La Habana dedicated a
monographic issue to him. Marinetti, who visited Madrid, dedicated to him, to
Giménez Caballero and to Guillermo de Torre his text “España veloz” (“Rapid
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Spain”) in La Gaceta Literaria. He stayed in Paris, where he spent time with
Norberto Beberide, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Jean Cassou, José de Creeft,
Germán Cueto, the Countess Cuevas de Vera, Joseph Delteil, Juan Manuel DíazCaneja, Adolphe de Falgairolle, Jacobo Fijman, Girondo, Max Jacob, Edmond
Jaloux, Demetrio Korsi—he would say, speaking about the American Continent: “I
see forests of poets and pampas of prose writers”—Valéry Larbaud, the Viscount
Lascano-Tegui, Agustín Lazo, Germán List Arzubide, Victoria Ocampo, Mathilde
Pomès, Jean Prévost, Jules Supervielle, Tono, Arqueles Vela and Esteban Vicente,
among others, the majority of whom frequented his literary circle at a café in
Montparnasse, La Consigne. Sitting astride an elephant, he delivered his address
as the Cirque d’Hiver. Miguel Ángel Asturias interviewed him for the Guatemalan
newspaper El Imparcial in an aeroplane flying over Paris, and Frédéric Lefèvre
interviewed him again for his section “Une heure avec …” in Les Nouvelles
Littéraires. Ernesto Giménez Caballero published his “Fichas sobre el ramonismo” (“Pages on Ramonism”) in El Sol, José Bergamín published his “Solo de
Ramón. Trompeta con sordina” (“Solo by Ramón: Muted Trumpet”) in Papel de
Aleluyas and Corpus Barga his chronicle “Ramón in Paris”. in Revista de
Occidente. He stayed at a hotel in Cascais in order to recover El Ventanal, a task
that he would finally give up. He began to contribute to the Buenos Aires
newspaper La Nación.
1929
He published Efigies and, in a leading article for La Gaceta Literaria,
Novísimas greguerías. He produced the prologue for an anthology of
poems by Luis de Góngora, and the definitive edition of Levíana, by the
Portuguese António Ferro. He wrote about the group of Spanish artists resident
in the Paris of the Botanical Gardens. He was visited by Paul Morand. He took
part in the banquet organised for the Peruvian writer and journalist César Falcón.
With his face painted black, at the Palacio de la Prensa in Madrid he presented
the film The Jazz Singer, as part of the activities organised by the Cinema Club
of La Gaceta Literaria. Upon the initiative of Valentín Andrés Álvarez, and in the
midst of a huge scandal—during which Jardiel Poncela punched Francisco
Lucientes—he premièred Los medios seres at the Teatro Alcázar. He had a love
affair—“the most delicate moment of my life”, he would claim in
Automoribundia—with María Álvarez de Burgos, the daughter of Carmen de
Burgos. “After twenty-five idyllic days together”, at the beginning of 1930 he
departed for Paris again after delivering a conference at the Ateneo Guipuzcoano
in San Sebastián. A text of his on “cante jondo” (traditional flamenco singing) was
translated into French by Alejo Carpentier for Bifur. Edgar Neville included as a
prologue to his novel Don Clorato de Potasa a text entitled “Small Autobiography
(Letter to Ramón Gómez de la Serna)”.
1930
From the French capital he sent articles to El Sol, brought together by
Nigel Dennis in the volume París (Valencia, Pre-Textos, 1986): on a dinner
with Cocteau at the home of Isabel Dato, on “the scandal of Maldoror”, on a film
project (La bestia andaluza) by Luis Buñuel, on literary populism, on “Máscaras de
hierro” (“Iron Masks”) by José de Creeft and Germán Cueto, on “Fotógrafos
nuevos” (“New Photographers”), on Ehrenburg, on Bontempelli and Pitigrilli—with
the latter and with Cami, who appointed him a member of the Academy of Humour,
he planned a collective novel—on Victoria Ocampo, on “El ojo de James Joyce”
(“James Joyce’s Eye”) … From Paris, he participated in the trip to Catalonia by
Spanish writers. He stayed in Berlin. He published a biography of Azorín and his
Madrid novel La nardo. He wrote the prologue for Mapa de América by the
Ecuadorian essayist Benjamín Carrión and La callejuela de Moscú by Ilya
Ehrenburg. A stormy Pombo banquet was organised for Ernesto Giménez
Caballero (Ramón wrote a long presentation text for the corresponding leaflet),
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during which a confrontation took place between Antonio Espina and Ramiro
Ledesma Ramos, who drew a pistol. He acted a part in the film by Giménez
Caballero Esencia de verbena, along with Miguel Pérez Ferrero, Samuel Ros and
other writer friends. Within the field of film, El orador was produced, also referred
to on some occasions as La mano: Ramón delivered a conference. His film project
with Luis Buñuel, El periódico, did not materialise; the Aragonese film-maker would
tell Max Aub years later that “Ramón Gómez de la Serna has been the most
influential man of our generation”. He wrote an article on Ángeles Santos—whom
he had visited in Valladolid—in La Gaceta Literaria, to whose important survey on
the avant-garde he would reply: “I will die admiring that word”. The Madrid radio
station Unión Radio, with whom he had worked for a number of years, set up a
microphone at his house—that year he moved to Calle de Villanueva, 38—with
which he addressed the station’s listeners each night with his section “Cronista de
guardia” (“Commentator on Call”). He collaborated on the Surrealist issue of
Butlletí. Ramiro Ledesma Ramos included him—probably without his consent—on
the list of contributors to his magazine La Conquista del Estado, in which his
signature did not appear. Eduardo Lamela, the owner of Pombo, died.
1931
He published Ismos—whose cover featured the portrait of him by Diego
Rivera—Elucidario de Madrid (his summary of the city of his birth) and
La hiperestésica. He contributed, with a chapter on “Charity”, to the collective
book Las 7 virtudes. He wrote the prologue for Campeones del mundo by Paul
Morand. At the collective inauguration exhibition of the Lyceum Club in Madrid,
Isaías Díaz presented a picture inspired by one of his aphorisms: Pasa la bicicleta
por lo alto del camino y el paisaje se pone gafas. On 14 April, the date on which
the Second Republic was proclaimed, he spent the entire day walking around
Madrid in the company of Jean Cassou. He collaborated on anti-clerical magazines
such as Fray Lazo and Pele-Mele. At the Hotel Ritz in Barcelona he delivered a
conference entitled “Objetos escogidos” (“Chosen Objects”). He attended the
Semana de la Sabiduría de Formentor (“Wisdom Week of Formentor”), chaired by
Keyserling. He visited Buenos Aires for the first time, where he gave a number of
addresses at Amigos del Arte and at Signo, also participating at the launch party
for Sur—a magazine he would also contribute to and in which Guillermo de Torre
reviewed his conferences—at the home of Victoria Ocampo. He toured the city in
the company of Girondo, and he met, at the banquet staged in his honour at the
Argentinean PEN Club, Luisa Sofovich, the Argentinian writer of Russian parents
born in 1905, with whom he would return to Spain. The couple would remain
together for the rest of their lives. From Argentina he visited other cities in the
country—Mendoza, Córdoba, Santiago del Estero and Azul—as well as Uruguay (in
Montevideo he met Carlos W. Aliseris, Ángel Aller, Ángel Falco, Alfredo Mario
Ferreiro and Roberto Ibañez), Paraguay and Chile, in whose capital a number of
doctors paid tribute to him at an operating theatre. Soon afterwards he announced
a book, Tremedal americano y pasión de otras estrellas, which never appeared in
the end. The Marquis of Villa-Urrutia, Manuel de Sandoval and Emilio GutiérrezGamero unsuccessfully presented Ramón’s candidature for the Academia
Española de la Lengua (Spanish Academy of Language). The Chilean Oreste Plath
published an article on “Charlie Chaplin and Ramón” in La Gaceta Literaria. César
González-Ruano published in Ondas an article on “Ramón and the Radio”:
“Ramón the Great! You have to hear him sing mass on the Radio like a priest, and
always expect something. Prodigy, discovery—which are sometimes encompassed
by the same adjective—will irremediably come”.
1932
Carmen de Burgos died, whom Ramón visited until the very last day. He
published his novel Policéfalo y señora, dedicated to Victoria Ocampo,
and his short story Las consignatarias. He wrote the libretto for the opera
Charlot by Salvador Bacarisse. He wrote the prologue for an anthology of poems
by Mauricio Bacarisse, Antología. In Arte he published an article on Solana, and
in Cahiers d’Art another on Picasso. He collaborated as a speaker to the
Committees on International Cooperation of the Republic, appearing in Burgos,
Lugo, Palencia, Santiago de Compostela, Segovia, Seville, Valladolid and Vigo.
He participated in a posthumous tribute to María Blanchard at the Ateneo in
Madrid. Lino Novás Calvo portrayed him over a background depicting Pombo in
an article for Revista Bimestre Cubana. The Mariano de Cavia Prize was awarded
to César González-Ruano: “The success of González-Ruano lies in the fact that
he lends a literary air to everything he does”.
1933
As a member of the committee for the Exposición del Libro Español
(Spanish Book Exhibition) he visited Buenos Aires for the second time,
where he carried a rolled-up picture by Solana entitled La tertulia de Pombo as
the starting-point for a conference on literary cafés, once again hosted by Amigos
del Arte. He gave conferences in Bahía Blanca, Salta and other cities. Lola Membrives put on Los medios seres at the Teatro Maipo. He made a failed attempt to
stage Charlot by Bacarisse at the Teatro Colón, upon the initiative of Victoria
Ocampo and Juan José Castro; he proposed that Chaplin himself be contracted for
the première. Once again in Madrid, Luisa Sofovich became seriously ill with
septicemia. He wrote the prologue for Contrapelo by F. di Giglio. In Arte he wrote
an article on Norah Borges. Alexander Calder visited Madrid with his miniature
circus, giving two performances at the Residencia de Estudiantes; the sculptor
visited Pombo and Ramón’s studio; according to Luisa Sofovich, Ramón would
have organised the performances, taking part in them as an orator.
1934
In Cruz y Raya he published his decisive “Ensayo sobre lo cursi” (“Essay
on the Vulgar”) and in Revista de Occidente another on “Las cosas y el
ello” (“Things and the Id”). He collaborated on Diablo Mundo, the weekly publication run by Corpus Barga.
1935
He published Los muertos, las muertas y otras fantasmagorías,
Flor de greguerías, a biography of El Greco, and, in the magazine Cruz
y Raya, his play Escaleras, illustrated by José Caballero, and a selection of
aphorisms, Greguerías 1935 . He wrote the prologue for Sol de la noche by the
female poet Ruth de Velázquez, and El diablo y la técnica by the Peruvian
architect and humourist Héctor Velarde. He collaborated on Almanaque Literario
1935 produced by Miguel Pérez Ferrero, Esteban Salazar Chapela and Guillermo
de Torre, and on El aviso de escarmentados del año que acaba y escarmiento
para avisados del que empieza de 1935, in Cruz y Raya. He delivered
conferences in Paris and Brussels, accompanied by Luisa Sofovich, who would
later recount the trip in La vida sin Ramón, highlighting meetings with Cassou
and Cocteau. Cruz y Raya published the first biography devoted to him, “Vida de
Ramón” (“Life of Ramón”) by Miguel Pérez Ferrero. In Indice Literario Pedro
Salinas published his “Escorzo de Ramón” (“Foreshortening of Ramón”), and
Guillermo de Torre an article on “Picasso and Ramón” in Diario de Madrid. He
participated, along with Antoniorrobles and Salvador Bartolozzi, in the Twelfth
Night Procession in Madrid, La Cabalgata de los Reyes Magos.
1936
In the last issue of Cruz y Raya he published a selection of new
aphorisms, “Greguerías nuevas”. He presented the Madrid lecture of Paul
Éluard on Surrealism at the Ateneo in Madrid. He collaborated on the Picasso
issue of the Gaceta de Arte of Tenerife. He broadcast a radio obituary of Eugenio
Noel. He attended a banquet at the Hotel Ritz to mark the silver anniversary of his
Law Degree. He participated in the visits to romantic cemeteries organised by
Mariano Rodríguez de Rivas, and which Agustín de Foxá would relate to Curzio
Malaparte, who was to feature it in Kaputt. He handed to Neruda a text on Julio
Herrera y Reissig for a monographic issue of Caballo verde para la poesía that
failed to come out in the end. The outbreak of the Civil War took him by surprise
in Madrid. According to Nicanor del Pardo, one of the participants, the Pombo
literary circle of Saturday 18 July “took on a very different appearance compared
to the normal meeting”: “Our cheerful, rowdy and even crazy meeting had become
a kind of funeral wake”. He appeared on the list of founders of the Alliance of AntiFascist Intellectuals for the Defence of Culture. In spite of this, he was alarmed by
many aspects, especially the print of Pedro Luis de Gálvez armed to the teeth, that
he found near the Lyon d’Or. In August he decided to depart with Luisa Sofovich
to Buenos Aires—the pretext being the international congress of the PEN Club.
Alicante—a place he would reach in the car of the Argentinian cultural attaché—
Marseille and Burgundy were the initial stages of the journey, which also included
a period in Montevideo, during which he saw Ángel Aller. In the Argentinian capital,
following a period in a hotel, he found an apartment at number 1974 Calle Victoria,
later owned by Hipólito Yrigoyen, where he established his study-home. In Santiago de Chile, he published his novel ¡Rebeca! He wrote the prologue for La gruta
artificial by Luisa Sofovich, and Todo el mundo sabe que esto son diez dedos by
Cardenio, A Spanish caricaturist resident in Chile. During the war, in spite of
receiving offers from the Republican side—he was called to collaborate with them
by José Bergamín in El Mono Azul and by José Luis Salado in La Voz—he would
end up siding with the Francoists. His house in Madrid, entrusted to Salvador
Bartolozzi, would be looted and all his possessions stolen. The work entitled La
tertulia de Pombo by Solana was collected by the Council for the Salvaging of
Artistic Treasures, and moved to the Prado Museum; this operation featured the
participation of Francisco Mateos, Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino, Daniel Vázquez
Díaz and Eduardo Vicente, among others.
1937
He published a collection of short stories El cólera azul.
1938
In Sur he published his portrait of Girondo. In Música, a magazine on the
republican side, he published the first page of the score for Charlot by
Bacarisse, which at that time was intended to be staged at the Liceu in
Barcelona.
1939
A few months after the end of the Civil War, La tertulia de Pombo by
Solana was moved back to the café, where the following year the literary
circle would be reformed around José Sanz y Díaz, and where a frieze of caricatures
of Pombo members by Luis Lasa was hung up. In a letter to Giménez Caballero he
observed: “With Sánchez Mazas, with José María Alfaro and with Manuel Aznar I
have been preparing a position within Spanish journalism for some months”.
1940
In Austral he published a selection of aphorisms, Greguerías.
1941
He published Retratos contemporáneos, and a revised edition in one
volume, with new material, both concerning Pombo, dedicated to Jardiel
Poncela. To mark the appearance of the first of these books, a banquet was held
in his honour, at which Norah Lange gave a speech.
1942
He published Mi tía Carolina Coronado, a biography of Nerval and a
monograph on Maruja Mallo. He began to publish fragments of what
would later be entitled Automoribundia in Revista de Indias in Bogotá.
491
1943
He published Lo cursi y otros ensayos, and a monograph on Velázquez. He wrote a prologue for an anthology of writings on art by John
Ruskin. He produced an extended re-edition with two extra chapters,
“Ducassismo”—about Lautréamont—and “Daliismo” from Ismos, a book that
would be decisive in strengthening the artistic vocation of Antonio Saura. A reedition of El circo was produced by the Barcelona publisher José Janés,
featuring a prologue by his brother Julio.
1944
He published Doña Juana la Loca, and his biographies of Lope de
Vega, Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and José Gutiérrez
Solana. “La emparedada de Burgos” (“The Recluse of Burgos”) appeared in
Escorial. He wrote the prologue for Papeles de recienvenido by Macedonio
Fernández, an anthology by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and another
anthology of writings on art by Oscar Wilde. Thanks to José Ignacio Ramos, he
began to contribute to the Madrid newspaper Arriba, where his section was
initially entitled “De orilla a orilla” (“From Shore to Shore”), later being called
“Nostalgias”. He handed to José Antonio Giménez Arnau, the Secretary of the
Embassy in Buenos Aires, a literary portrait of the Uruguayan poet Julio Herrera y
Reissig–most probably it was the text of 1936 that he wrote for Caballo verde
para la poesía—and his short story Museo de reproducciones; both texts were
to be published many years later: Museo de reproducciones (Barcelona,
Destino, 1980), with a prologue by Francisco Yndurain.
1945
He published Nuevos retratos contemporáneos, Completa y
verídica historia de Picasso y el cubismo—in reality an Italian edition
without the chapter “Picassismo” from Ismos—and a monography on Norah
Borges. The Brazilian painter and sailor José Pancetti produced a self-portrait, in
Auto-vida, depicting himself holding the second edition of Ismos in his hand. In
Gog Giovanni Papini included a biographical sketch of Ramón set against the
background of Pombo. The City Council of Madrid granted him its Silver Medal.
1946
1949
He wrote the prologue for Libro de Madrid by his nephew Gaspar
Gómez de la Serna, featuring illustrations by Juan Esplandiu. He
travelled to Spain with Luisa Sofovich, organised by the Propaganda
Department, headed by Pedro Rocamora. After alighting from the boat in Bilbao
and spending the night at the Hotel Carlton, he travelled to Madrid in a
Government car, staying at the Hotel Ritz. He staged four literary circle meetings
at Pombo, the first broadcast on the radio. Banquets in his honour were held at
Arriba, in the Rastro, at Café Biarritz—organised by the Guild of Bookshop
Owners—at El Púlpito—organised by the City Council—and at Botín, the latter
featuring a speech by Edgar Neville. Mariano Rodríguez de Rivas organised a
reception in his honour at the Romantic Museum. Giménez Caballero welcomed
him to his literary circle at the Café de Levante. Another reception took place at
the publisher’s Afrodisio Aguado. He delivered conferences at the Ateneo—“La
magia de la literatura” (“The Magic of Literature”)—and at the Teatro Lara—“Mi tía
Carolina Coronado”. The City Council placed a plaque outside the house in
which he was born, organising a ceremony for this purpose that he attended. At
the Palace of El Pardo he visited Francisco Franco; Rafael Flórez, in his book
Ramón de Ramones, gave a detailed account of this visit. Flórez met Ramón
during the trip. The couple travelled to Barcelona by train; in the Catalan capital
he delivered conferences and saw Sebastià Gasch and Ángel Zúñiga, among
others. The couple returned on the same boat, Bilbao-Buenos Aires. He
published Las tres gracias—subtitled “Novela madrileña de invierno” (“Winter
Madrid Novel”)—Interpretación del tango and Cartas a las golondrinas. He
was one of the undersigned for the Homenaje a Antonio de Undurraga, the
Chilean poet.
1950
In order to mark the final closure of the café, in whose place a shop
selling luggage was set up, he published his “Funeral Rites for Pombo”
in Arriba. Mariano Rodríguez de Rivas acquired one of the marble tables from the
café for the Museo Romántico. He was appointed a member of the Institute of
Madrid Studies. He began to contribute to the magazine Clavileño in Madrid.
A revised edition of Gollerías came out. Arriba published “La felicitación
de Pascuas de Ramón Gómez de la Serna” (“Easter Greetings from
Ramón Gómez de la Serna”), a fragment of a letter to the editor of the newspaper,
Xavier Echarri: “From here I now see a Spain that is freer of bad associations than
ever, and now it is your responsibility to be rigorous so that undesirable tourists
do not enter. On your side you have God, and the Archangel of the blazing sword
must expel from that hermetic Paradise, as Paradise can only be, all those who do
not deserve to be in it. The purest of initiatives, that of being alone and uninfected,
has been granted to you. Enjoy it!”
He published biographies on Quevedo—“In memory of Macedonio Fernández, the Quevedo native, as a tribute to my imperishable admiration”—
and Edgar Allan Poe. His brother José died in Santiago de Chile. He received
an Argentinian television award.
1947
1954
His sister Dolores died in Madrid. He published his novel El hombre
perdido, Cuentos de fin de año—illustrated by Eduardo Vicente—
Trampantojos, and Greguerías completas. Plenitud published a volume of his
selected works, Obras Selectas. He donated La tertulia de Pombo by Solana
to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Madrid. After certain difficulties with one of the
café owner’s heirs, the Museum finally received the work. The painting travelled
to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, as part of an exhibition on
Spanish art; in front of the painting, Ramón gave a speech about the painter of
the picture.
1948
He published Automoribundia, his finest masterpiece, and Explicación de Buenos Aires. José María Pemán published an article in
ABC on “El Dios de Gómez de la Serna” (“The God of Gómez de la Serna”).
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1952
He corresponded with Rafael Flórez about the death of Enrique Jardiel
Poncela, “our much-admired friend who is no longer with us but will
always reappear in the history of Literature”.
1953
He wrote a letter to Gloria Fuertes, published in a posthumous book
about the poet Glorierías (Madrid, Torremozas, 2001). The very title itself
is a tribute to the “greguerías ramonianas” (“Ramonian aphorisms”).
1955
To mark his golden anniversary within the field of literature, the Argentinian publishers Emecé, Espasa-Calpe Argentina, Losada, Poseidón and
Sudamericana grouped together in order to publish an anthology of his work,
featuring a prologue by Guillermo de Torre. He published Total de greguerías.
He wrote the epilogue for Crónica del Café Gijón by Marino Gómez Santos. A
dinner in his honour was organised by Rafael Alberti, Rafael Dieste, María Teresa
León, Luis Seoane, Lorenzo Varela and other exiles. The Madrid magazine Indice
devoted a monographic issue to him, featuring the collaboration, among others,
of Ricardo Baeza, Tomás Borrás, Antonio Díaz Cañabate, Edgar Neville—“Ramón,
the supply ship”—and José María Pemán, as well as a number of younger writers
such as Julián Ayesta, Eusebio García Luengo, Marino Gómez Santos and
Gaspar Gómez de la Serna. W.M. Bonermann presented a doctoral thesis at New
York University on Ramón Gómez de la Serna and the Greguería.
1956
He published Cartas a mí mismo and Nostalgias de Madrid. The publisher AHR produced the first volume of his complete works, Obras
Completas, of which the second and last volumes—there should have been
several more—would come out the following year. He began to contribute to the
Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín. He wrote an article on Maruja Mallo for
Atlántida.
1957
He published Mis mejores páginas literarias and Nuevas páginas de
mi vida, subtitled “What I Didn’t Say in Automoribundia”, in which,
among other matters, he talked about “The Lost Portrait” (his own by Diego Rivera)
and about “An Unaccomplished Opera”–his Charlot with Bacarisse—on whose
cover would appear a Ramonian still-life of Gregorio Prieto. Luis Cernuda included
in his Estudios sobre la poesía española contemporánea an essential study on
“Gómez de la Serna and the Poetic Generation of 1925”. Neruda, who had recently
emerged from an Argentinean prison, visited him in Buenos Aires. A monograph on
his work by the lecturer from Costa Rica, Rodolfo Cardona, appeared.
1958
He published Flor de greguerías.
1959
Aguilar brought together his complete biographies, Biografías completas. The Spanish Government awarded him the Grand Cross of Alfonso X the Wise. Pablo Neruda dedicated an ode to him.
1960
Juventud published an abbreviated, pocket edition of Pombo. He stayed
for the summer in Uruguay. He received the Juan Palomo Prize, established in Madrid by Manuel Halcón.
1961
He married Luisa Sofovich in church. He published what would be his last
novel, Piso bajo, based on a Madrid theme. El Rastro was re-published
as Guía del Rastro, featuring a number of excellent photographs by the filmmaker Carlos Saura—in 2002 a re-edition would published by the reader’s club,
Círculo de Lectores, with further photographs and better print—along with drawings and a map by Eduardo Vicente. Aguilar brought together his Retratos completos. He ceased to contribute to Arriba, transferring to ABC, where he would
publish a section entitled “Greguerías inéditas”, illustrated by Lorenzo Goñi.
1962
An anthology of his work appeared, featuring a prologue by Luisa Sofovich and published by the Ministry of Education and Justice of Argentina.
He received the Madrid Prize from the Juan March Foundation. The Argentinian
Parliament granted him a life pension of five thousand pesos a month.
1963
He died in Buenos Aires on 12 January. A flame burns in the chapel created
at the Spanish Cultural Institution. Among the obituaries, we might mention
those of Enrique de Aguinaga, Manuel Alcántara, Juan Aparicio, Camilo José Cela,
Evaristo Correa Calderón, Francisco de Cossío, Antonio Díaz-Cañabate, Guillermo
Díaz-Plaja, Gerardo Diego, Joaquín de Entrambasaguas, Antonio Espina, Melchor
Fernández Almagro, Rafael García Serrano, Luis Gómez Mesa, César GonzálezRuano—who called him “Dearest Ramón”—Salvador Jiménez, Alfredo Marqueríe,
Edgar Neville, Antonio de Obregón, Josep Pla, Esteban Salazar Chapela, Manuel
Sánchez Camargo, Dámaso Santos, Guillermo de Torre and Gonzalo Torrente
Ballester. He also received sketched tributes from Antonio Mingote and Máximo. Ten
days later, his remains were flown to Madrid and placed in the chapel at the Patio de
Cristales del Ayuntamiento. Many years later, Francisco Umbral would write, in the
place corresponding to La noche que llegué al Café Gijón, an account of his burial
at the Sacramental de San Justo, alongside Larra’s grave. José Camón Aznar
delivered a conference about him at the Institute of Madrid Studies, Gaspar Gómez
de la Serna another at the Colegio Mayor Covarrubias, and Gerardo Diego another
at the Ateneo, Lope y Ramón. Biographies were devoted to him by Gaspar Gómez
de la Serna—that obtained the Premio Nacional de Ensayo (National Essay Prize)—
and Luis S. Granjel. In July, the City Council organised a posthumous tribute to him
in Plaza Mayor with a première of his play Escaleras. The publisher Dynamo of Liège
published Apologie de la linotype, a French translation of an unknown text by
Ramón featuring a prologue by Franz Hellens.
493
este libro de
los ismos de ramón gómez de la serna
y un apéndice circense
se terminó en madrid el 3 de junio de 2002

Greguerías - Accion Cultural Española

Transcription

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