Ramon Gomez de la Serna

Ramón Gómez de la Serna Puig (Madrid, July 3, 1888-Buenos Aires, January 12, 1963) was a prolific Spanish avant-garde writer and journalist, generally ascribed to the generation from 1914 or noucentisme, and promoter of the literary genre known as greguería. He has an extensive literary work that ranges from costumbrista essays or biography (he wrote several: about Valle Inclán, Azorín and about himself: Automoribundia ) to novels and theater. His life and work is a break against convention. He is thus an incarnation with the spirit and performance of the avant-garde, to which he will dedicate a book called Ismos . His work is extensive and its central axis is the greguerías: a genre initiated by him, as a set of notes in which he contains a conceptual pirouette or an unusual metaphor. They are usually of various types: jokes, puns, or even as philosophical notes.

“Ramón”, as he liked to be called, wrote a hundred books, most of them translated into several languages. He disseminated the European avant-garde from his crowded gathering at the Café de Pombo immortalized by his friend, the expressionist painter and writer José Gutiérrez Solana. He especially wrote biographies in which the character reviewed was actually an excuse for digression and the accumulation of anecdotes, true or invented

Biography

His life has been recorded by several biographers, some of them friends of his. He himself wrote his autobiography during his period of exile in Buenos Aires at the age of sixty. The period that includes his life goes from the end of the XIX century to the middle of the XX . During all this time he witnessed great social and political changes in Europe and Spain, and as such his performance as a vehicle for the entry into Spain of the avant-garde was important.

Childhood and youth

He was born in Madrid on July 3, 1888, at number five Calle de las Rejas (currently number seven Calle Guillermo Rolland). Son of Javier Gómez de la Serna y Laguna, a a lawyer with a clear vocation for the liberal party and government official of the Ministry of Overseas, and his mother, Mrs. Josefa Puig Coronado, niece of the writer Carolina Coronado. Upon being baptized in the Church of San Martín, the names of Ramón Javier José and Eulogio. He spent his childhood playing in the Plaza de Oriente, accompanied by his aunt Milagros. A few years later the family moved to Cuesta de la Vega street, close to Segovia street (at the height of the viaduct). A rise in rents, together with the expectation of a new brother for Ramón, made the family move to the central street of Corredera Baja de San Pablo (near the Teatro Lara, recently opened at the time). It is at this time that he began his training at the Colegio del Niño Jesús in Madrid. Due to the disaster of 1898, the Ministry of Overseas was closed, which forced his father to present himself to an opposition as property registrar, an opposition that he finally won, causing the family to move to Frechilla (a town in the province of Palencia).

Gómez de la Serna will spend three years together with his brother José, both interned at the Colegio de San Isidoro in the city of Palencia (near the Cathedral). During these three years the Spanish political situation was very complicated, the loss progressive colonies and political agitation encouraged the political aspirations of his father, Javier Gómez de la Serna, who in his frequent trips to the Capital is acquiring fame, until he was elected liberal deputy for the district of Hinojosa del Duque in 1898 and years later. For this reason, later the entire family returns to Madrid again to a house located on Calle Fuencarral (numbers 33-34), where Ramón continues his studies at the Piarist Fathers of the Cardenal Cisneros Institute. His uncle Andrés García de Barga y Gómez de la Serna (a year older than him), nicknamed Corpus Barga , indirectly encourages him to write with his example.

At the age of fourteen, in 1902, while still in high school, he launched, as its director, a hand-written publication called "El Postal, Revista Defensora de los Derechos Estudiantiles", of which are "edited" several numbers, appearing in it a list of its "subscribers". The magazine is full of drawings, diverse and entertaining sections, and writings produced using traditional printing methods. Ramón already shows great talent and leadership at an early age (although also a great lack of following the spelling rules).

In 1903, Gómez de la Serna finished high school and his father gave him a trip to Paris as a prize. He does this trip alone, and with a small financial contribution he accommodates himself in a pension near the Seine. After high school he enrolled in the Faculty of Law, studies for which over the years he did not seem to be very attached. His uncle published a libretto at the age of seventeen entitled Cantares , a melancholic song to the years of adolescence. The example of his uncle further stimulates Ramón's already premature love of literature, and he strives to emulate her. In 1905 his father, who was then General Director of Registries and Notaries, financed his first work published through a registered publishing medium, entitled "Enterando en fuego". Gómez de la Serna was sixteen years old when the book was published in the press of the Diario de Avisos de Segovia. The family is surprised by the appearance of two writers at such a young age, with the exception of their aunt Carolina Coronado, who encourages them to continue. Despite this, unaware of his motives, in 1908 he enrolled at the University of Oviedo to continue his law studies. Despite finishing his degree, he never came to practice the profession: the literary desire absorbed him. The family advises him to take advantage of the career to oppose the Administration. In 1908 he published what will be his second book, Morbideces, in which he portrays himself in his own youth and contains the principles of what is considered his style. It is at this time that he dies his mother Josefa Puig Coronado. He began his literary career in journalism, where he stood out for his originality, waging an imaginative and nihilistic rebellion against a stagnant, bourgeois society without expectations. He begins to hang around the social gathering cafes in Madrid, leaves at ten at night, after dinner, and returns at two, working at night.

Beginnings: Prometeo Magazine

Bronze search by Gómez de la Serna, by Enrique Pérez Comendador. Details of the monument to the writer in the Jardines de Las Vistillas de Madrid (1972).

Gómez de la Serna leaves the family home on Fuencarral street and settles on Puebla street; In this new enclave he will have a more intimate space to be able to write journalistic articles. At this time, he inaugurated the magazine Prometeo and writes under the pseudonym Tristán . The magazine served the political interests of his father and he wanted to renew the Spanish literary scene, drawing fundamentally from turn-of-the-century French and English literature. In the sixth issue of Prometheus, Gómez de la Serna wrote an article entitled «The concept of the new literature»; this headline opens the way to the collaboration that will last four years throughout its thirty-eight issues. Gómez de la Serna is branded as an iconoclast, an anarchist of letters, a blasphemer, etc. During this period he not only dedicated himself to writing in Prometheus , but also gave lectures at the Ateneo de Madrid. During these years he published Beatriz (1909), the drama Desolation, Athenaeum, The silent book and, in 1911, South of the Spanish sculptural renaissance, as well as Las muertas.

At the age of twenty-one, he falls in love with Carmen de Burgos, also a writer and journalist, nicknamed Colombine, a woman twenty years his senior. She, who had separated from her husband and was widowed in 1909, lives alone with her teenage daughter and has a place at the Normal School. Punctually, every day Gómez de la Serna would visit her at her house at five in the afternoon, they wrote together and then walked through the cafes of Puerta del Sol until midnight. His father's concern over this crazy idyll causes him to influence him and appoint him pension secretary in the Spanish office in Paris. Gómez de la Serna was excited about his second trip to this city, staying near the Café de la Source (where Manuel Machado went in the afternoons). Despite the estrangement, Carmen asked for a three-year leave of absence and left with him in 1909. They made several trips around Europe, visiting London, Naples and Lisbon, among other cities. In Paris, they were visited by friends like Eduardo Zamacois's wife or his uncle Corpus Barga, with whom Gómez de la Serna used to meet at the Café de la Source. During this stay in Paris he continued to write in the magazine Prometheus. Right at the end of the stage, he begins to mention to his friends a new creation: the greguerías. Carmen de Burgos was the godmother of the greguerías in that Parisian period.He would write the greguerías little by little, throughout his life.

A trip to England coincided with the Christmas period and when he returned to Paris he had an angry interview with Pío Baroja (both did not like each other). After that he traveled to Italy and later to Switzerland. When he arrived in Paris, he received news of the planned dismantling, by his father, of the Prometheus magazine. On the other hand, his employment as pension secretary in Paris was coming to an end. Little by little the idea of returning to Madrid was becoming more evident. Finally they both return to Madrid, Carmen resumes her job at the Normal School and he returns to Calle de la Puebla.

Pombian period

Gómez de la Serna returned to the Madrid cafes and became friends with the painter José Gutiérrez Solana, from Azorín, Manuel Bueno and many others who would accompany him at gatherings. Among all of them, Paco Vighi and Tomás Borrás are inseparable. He soon enters the payroll of the newspaper La Tribuna . After receiving a pension from his father, he returned to Paris for the third time in 1914 and wrote what would be his first novel, The Unlikely Doctor , finishing the book on the same day that the First War began. World. The warlike environment makes him return to Madrid again. His father gets him the position of technical officer of the Supreme Court Prosecutor's Office. He dedicated himself to fulfilling the new position and daily went to the Supreme Court.

Upon his return from Madrid after his third trip to Paris, he came up with the idea of creating a literary meeting in the form of a social gathering. In the first phase, he focused on finding an appropriate place, at that time there were many cafes and it was rather an arduous task to find an appropriate place for the gathering. One of the requirements was that it be central, not popular. One fine day he entered Café Pombo, a simple liquor store located at number 4 Calle Carretas. El Pombo was not one of the big cafés (like Fornos, Suizo, de la Montaña, etc.) and perhaps that abandonment and the worn appearance of the premises that Gómez de la Serna himself called 'anachronism' They decided to summon his friends there by means of informal invitation cards. The gathering, held on Saturdays after dinner -those who could- was baptized "sacred crypt of Pombo" and remained active between 1914 and 1936.

Cover Pombo (1918), by Romero Calvet.

It is now that Gómez de la Serna becomes more of a Madrid native. The year 1917 is fully dedicated to Pombo. The gathering is a success and the echoes of it even reach Paris. His father goes to live temporarily in Segovia and Gómez de la Serna buys a hotel on the new Calle María de Molina number 43. In 1918 he wrote a summary book of gatherings, El Pombo, a work that he completed in a second volume that years later would be titled The sacred crypt of Pombo. His father retired from political life and shortly after died of diabetes on February 22, 1922. Gómez de la Serna then sold the little hotel and the five brothers (Ramón, Pepe, Javier, Julio and Lola). they disperse.

Gómez de la Serna rents a studio at Calle de Velázquez number 4 (later to be called the Torreón de Velázquez and which later became part of the Hotel Wellington), and in this reduced Space places his things and knick-knacks, and puts a stamp of photos and newspaper clippings on the walls. He places a wax mannequin in the shape of a woman, which he adorns and dresses. Payroll income from the City Council was suddenly cut off in 1923 with the coming to power of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, who cuts off the 'fictitious' in order to reduce burdens on the State. With the inheritance and the sale of the little hotel, he had a chalet built in Estoril (Portugal), which he called El Ventanal . He collaborated in the Lisbon magazine Contemporânea Madrid-Lisbon weekend trips became frequent in search of solitude and an atmosphere conducive to writing. Gómez de la Serna's income came from his collaboration in El Liberal and the sale of books. His poor economy caused him to finally have to sell El Ventanal . A press strike left the country without newspapers and as a result he ended up closing El Liberal. It is at that time that Nicolás María de Urgoiti created the newspaper El Sol and Ramón began to write in the newspaper; This collaboration had a great impact. He also writes from time to time for La Voz.At the age of thirty-five Gómez de la Serna was already well known in the literary and journalistic world. On March 13, 1923, his friends honored him with a literary dinner in Lhardy; This tribute would be very famous because Gómez de la Serna himself offered another parallel tribute in a more humble and affordable place for all budgets: El Oro del Rhine. The resonance of the event reached Paris.

Literary maturity

Gómez de la Serna began to collaborate with the Revista de Occidente (a collaboration that he did not abandon until 1936). In the twenties when he begins to develop biographies: Colette, Apollinaire and Remy de Gourmont. The atmosphere in Madrid was marked by the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, and many intellectuals had declared themselves against the regime. Gómez de la Serna, looking for other airs, decides to go live in Naples, where he settles at number 185 Rivera de Chiaia and continues sending his collaborations to El Sol and The Voice. He lived for two years in Naples, but finally ended up returning to his Torreón de Velázquez . Among the novelties that he faces are the radio in Spain (in which he participates) and the cinema. It is during this return that he became interested in bullfighting (in 1926 he published a novel entitled Torero Caracho ) and his books began to be translated into other languages.

He travels around Spain giving lectures, and in some cases he causes electrical failures, to give his famous suitcase lecture with a candlestick and when the light comes back on he eats said candle (made of jam). It is on these trips that he elaborates more greguerías.The "greguerizantes" conferences take place in various capitals; in them the surprising appears, causing confusion. Owner of his literary resources, he overflows in the conferences, and when he talks about the lanterns a blind man approaches him at the end of it to tell him that thanks to him "he has been able to see them." On other occasions he is not so successful, such as during the Cante Jondo Contest in Granada when one of his listeners, pointing a gun at him, comments to the spectator next to him: «What?... I'll kill him already?". He was one of the three foreign members of the French Academy of Humor along with Charles Chaplin and Pitigrilli. Valery Larbaud introduces the greguería (échantillons) in France. The excess of his gregueristic production can be criticized; but as Jorge Guillén said ( Automoribundia , chapter LI): «Certainly, Ramón, as soon as he opens his mouth, drops a greguería; proof that this constitutes, more than a literary genre, the spontaneous and elementary way of succeeding the normal and uninterrupted activity of his humor ».

On September 15, 1927, a headline appeared in the Madrid newspapers announcing the death of Ramón due to an error by the news agencies; for which reason those who called the tower to offer their condolences were surprised by his voice. The Argentine newspaper La Nación demands articles from him, something that he accepts with great enthusiasm. He is making his fourth trip to Paris to celebrate the new editions of The Circus and The Incongruous . Spanish newspapers cover Ramón's successes after the Pyrenees, and his uncle Ramón writes in the Revista de Occidente about the writer in Paris. The arrival of Paris makes Ramón find himself at the peak of his popularity.

In 1929, Gómez de la Serna tried to enter the theater with Los medios seres, a play for which he had only written the prologue, with the initial idea of publishing it in the Revista from the West. But Valentín Andrés Álvarez convinced him to stage it with the company led by Margarita Robles and Gonzalo Delgrás, which had specialized in avant-garde theater. He writes the first two acts in a week, and the rest during the staging of the play. During this period he had a love affair with María Álvarez de Burgos, daughter of his lover Carmen de Burgos, an episode that is included in the book Memorias de Colombine , by Federico Utrera. The work opens on December 7, 1929 at the Alcázar theater, raising enormous expectations. It was a failure on the day of the inauguration, and the booing was silenced by the friends of Pombo, among whom was Enrique Jardiel Poncela, of whom he declared himself a disciple, José López Rubio and Miguel Mihura. He retired from the bill in a few weeks. To get away from the stress caused by the theatrical setback, Ramón went to Paris, where he rents a studio, holds a gathering at the Café de la Consigne, and walks with his Parisian muse Magda.

He returned to Madrid again and left the torreón to go and live very close by, at number 38 Calle Villanueva, where he recomposed his baroque space in the torreón i>. He now he is dedicated to promoting new literary figures. Unión Radio signs a contract with Ramón so that he installs a microphone in his house so that he can give a radio session every day. Gómez de la Serna has friends, followers and enemies, including Federico García Sanchiz. At the beginning of 1930, Ramón's interest in visiting America arose, and by express invitation he traveled by ocean liner to give some conferences. In Buenos Aires he is very well received due to his contributions to La Nación . It is there when he meets Luisa Sofovich ( Luisita , as he called her from the beginning). Sofovich has a son from a failed marriage. Gómez de la Serna delays his trip so that she redoes his papers and can return with him to Madrid. When the three set foot on Spanish soil on February 23, 1932, the political situation corresponds to the height of the Second Republic. Gómez de la Serna continues to socialize in Madrid cafes, and even visits Carmen de Burgos, who remains forever locked up, with whom he resumes a friendship. He continues with radio talks on Unión Radio. Carmen de Burgos' condition worsened remarkably and on October 9, 1932 an angina brought her life to an end in the Divino Pastor studio.

Luisita, a porteña by birth, felt bad in Madrid, and after a year of living together, the homesickness was increasing. The Spanish book exhibition in Buenos Aires requests her presence as a member of the organizing committee, and simultaneously a cycle of conferences is organized. This was her second trip to Argentina and Luisita goes with him. The exhibition was highly visited, especially by readers of La Nación. It is on this trip that she devised the project of making an opera entitled Charlot, with music by Mauricio Bacarisse; although in the end the project comes to nothing. In October they begin the return to Europe.

Exile

The political situation that Gómez de la Serna finds himself in Spain after this second trip to Argentina is very volatile, due to the revolution of January 1933 and the Asturias revolution of 1934. Feelings are polarized, friends are divided on one side or the other and some of Pombo's friends joined the Falangism of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The gatherings become polarized and Ramón fears that the Cripta del Pombo will catch the air. Luisita falls ill with sepsis and that worries Ramón. Despite this, he continues his journalistic activity writing for the Diario Madrid . He is among the founders of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture. The atmosphere of tension forces Ramón to launch on July 10, 1936 a request for the closure of the gathering "La sagrada crypta" in the café de la Cart street. Sunday the eleventh was the last time he would broadcast his radio gathering on Unión Radio. The murders of Lieutenant Castillo and José Calvo Sotelo and the pronouncement of July 17 and 18, 1936 alarmed public opinion, precipitating events.

The outbreak of the Spanish civil war surprises Gómez de la Serna in Madrid. Luisita began to look for support in the newspaper La Nación to get Ramón and his family out of Spain, and later it was agreed that the international congress of the PEN Club would be held in Buenos Aires. Gómez de la Serna and Azorín had previously inaugurated the PEN Club in Spain. The departure was planned through a republican port that would allow their access to France and they decided to make the trip when confirmation of the three passages on the Belle Isle liner from Bordeaux arrived. Those nights before his departure were painful, since in Madrid he left the library that after forty-eight years he had managed to gather. Finally the port was Alicante and there an Italian freighter took him to Marseilles and later a train trip to Bordeaux. In Bordeaux, in third class passage, they began the trip to Montevideo with a stopover in Lisbon. This was his third trip to Argentina. There the poet Ángel Aller was waiting for them. A few hours after setting foot in Montevideo, he sent the articles written during the voyage to La Nación and a copy of the novel Rebeca! to Editorial Ercilla in Chile, for not being able to edit it now in Spain.

The Buenos Aires period

Plaque in the building of the street of Guillermo Rolland N.o 7.

The beginnings of their exile in the city of Buenos Aires were not very pleasant, and apart from Oliverio Girondo, who offers them help in those first moments of wandering, they find little support from other people. He received offers from Spain from his Falangist friend Tomás Borrás trying to join the cause, offers that he refused. The news that came from Spain announced a worsening of the war and Madrid was a city under siege. In Argentina, the interviews they carry out require him to take sides with one of the sides. And the conferences that he signs in contracts suggest a partisan point of view that Ramón tries to avoid. He reduces his social activity, and the years 1937 and 1938 are years of reissues of his works. In 1938 Girondo got them a house on Hipólito Yrigoyen street at the height of 1974 (Balvanera neighborhood), which would be his permanent residence. The Spanish civil war ends and his old friends send letters to his new address. Other Spaniards appear in Buenos Aires fleeing. He maintained special contact with Ortega y Gasset and Gregorio Marañón, who had sided with the rebels during the war. Later, a friend of his, Ignacio Ramos, was assigned to the embassy in Buenos Aires.

Little by little he merges with the society of Buenos Aires and is nourished by this new world for him. He is furiously devoted to greguería. Already at the beginning of the forties he identified himself with the porteño. He participates in the cultural activities of the city. He writes a biography about his aunt Carolina Coronado, from Azorín, the painter Maruja Mallo and Valle Inclán. He began writing articles at the beginning of May 1944 in the official Spanish newspaper Arriba, whose editor is Falangist Javier de Echarri, an admirer of Ramón's work. The Argentine elections of 1946 give victory to Juan Domingo Perón. At the end of the forties and in exile in Buenos Aires he began to write his autobiography, entitled Automoribundia . He locks himself in his studio and if he goes out, it's with Luisita to the Costanera , to the zoo, or to small streets with the aroma of Buenos Aires. He goes undercover he goes to the Richmond cafe, trying to remember the old days. He is diagnosed with diabetes, which already affected his father. He sleeps less and less and he needs medication to be able to do it. In 1947, Buenos Aires hosted an Exhibition of Spanish Art and Solana's painting on Pombo appeared among the pictorial works. The ownership of Solana's painting had been in dispute for some time between an heiress of the owner of Café Pombo (Eduardo Lamela) and Ramón, who finally ceded it to the Spanish state.

In 1948 he published his own biography, Automoribundia, in fifty-one chapters. In Spain its publication causes a furor. Gómez de la Serna is already sixty years old and feels nostalgic for his Madrid; This is how he makes it clear in his work The Three Graces, from 1949, in which the protagonist is Madrid himself and three girls. Despite his age, he plans trips to Montevideo and Chile to give lectures. The temptation to return to Spain exists, but he survives financially in Buenos Aires and Luisita (who takes care of him) is content living in her hometown. Gómez de la Serna read one day in the newspaper Arriba that the gathering of El Pombo was reviving led by José Sainz y Díaz, and where they will recite Legionnario Ballads. Gómez de la Serna was not amused by the news when he verified that his gathering was being used politically, which he had always prevented. Jesús Rubio (Undersecretary of National Education) had commissioned the president of the Ateneo de Madrid to officially invite Ramón on a two-month trip to Spain. Gómez de la Serna doubts and consults with his relatives, and finally decides to return. Together with Luisita, he takes a Spanish ship ( Monte Urbasa ), which takes him to Bilbao, with a stopover in the Canary Islands. The seventeen days of crossing the Atlantic and thirteen years of voluntary exile weigh heavily on his memory. On April 22, 1949, he arrived at the Bilbao estuary and three days later entered Madrid. He is staying at the Ritz Hotel. On his first departure from the hotel he goes to Café Lyon and is harassed by crowds of friends and onlookers. He communicates to all Pombians that on April 30, 1949 the Sacred Crypt was reopened. He managed to celebrate three sessions during his stay in Madrid, with conferences, protocol acts, chocolate parties, popular festivals, book presentations, and so on. Life in Madrid during this month passed quickly between exhausting days full of activities. The Madrid City Council places a commemorative plaque on him in the building where he was born and, in a recognition ceremony, draws back the protocol curtain. Among the official acts is a reception with Francisco Franco. Gómez de la Serna notes that little by little the official acts are cooling down and in the end they are non-existent. He decides to go to Barcelona and on May 31 he leaves Madrid to travel to Barcelona. Gómez de la Serna tells Luisita in Barcelona that they are leaving for Buenos Aires when they arrive in Bilbao. They take the boat back and proof of the sudden decision is that conferences are left without holding. During the return journey he is elusive and barely leaves the cabin.

Gómez de la Serna lives a solitary period of work locked up in his Buenaerense tower, but bad news arrives from Spain. The first is that the ruling of the National Literature Prize, which was presented with The three graces, awards the prize to the Uruguayan Antonio Larreta, while Azorín (who belonged to the jury) participated during the voting with a indolent and passive attitude. The other bad news is the definitive closure of the Café de Carretas, ending all illusions of holding another gathering. During the seven years from 1953 to 1960, Gómez de la Serna published twelve books and several thousand newspaper articles and several series of new greguerías. During that time, the changes of direction in the Spanish and official newspaper Arriba also show changes in artistic sensibility. The arrival of Rodrigo Royo to the direction of the newspaper causes him to send a letter to Gómez de la Serna begging him to stop sending greguerías, clarifying: «write something else; reports or articles for example”. Gómez de la Serna refused the request while the newspaper ABC offered him a contract to receive series of greguerías. Gómez de la Serna also works as a scriptwriter for Argentine television and becomes famous.

In Spain, his cousin Gaspar leads the international application for the Nobel Prize in literature, and the tributes are repeated simultaneously in Spain and Argentina. His health suffers, tied to insulin (a new medical discovery), and the doctors detect a latent phlebitis. The invitations to return to Madrid followed one another and the mayor of Madrid at that time, Count Mayalde, requested his presence on numerous occasions. Gómez de la Serna, with his precarious health, went for a walk, forced, only once a week. Argentina offers him a lifetime pension. The worsening of his health in 1962 caused the alarm to spread when cancer was detected between the pylorus and the duodenum. In April 1962, the ambassador informed him of the awarding of the Juan March prize. At the beginning of 1963, on January 12, Ramón died in Buenos Aires. On January 23, his remains arrive in Madrid, where he remains buried in the Pantheon of Illustrious Men, owned by the Association of Spanish Writers and Artists, in the Sacramental of San Justo, next to the tombs of Mariano José de Larra, José de Espronceda, Gaspar Núñez de Arce, Manuel Bretón de los Herreros, Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch and Eduardo Marquina.

The author

One of his most popular presentations was made with a dark suitcase: when the light restarted, he ate the candle.

A writer with a very marked personality and a vast body of work with more than a hundred titles, his most significant and recognized literary creation is the «greguería», born in 1910, which exerted an enormous influence on the creators of his time and, especially, in the poets of the generation of 27. Gómez de la Serna is a determined enthusiast of the new, and in whose defense and impulse he will display a very intense activity. However, not always his feverish creative activity was crowned with success. It was said of him that "everything that occurred to him he wrote, everything he wrote he published and everything he published he gave away, because his books hardly sold". His early vocation was announced when at the age of seventeen he wrote the which will be his first work, entitled Entering Fire (1905).

The journalist

It is very likely that Gómez de la Serna wrote from his first moments in various local newspapers. But his initial period was undoubtedly in his paternal Prometheus . You can follow his journalistic work prior to the Civil War in La Tribuna , El Liberal , El Sol and La Voz . His literary work can be found in almost all the magazines of the moment, from the minority and ephemeral ones to Revista de Occidente , La Gaceta Literaria or Cruz y Raya .

The twenties are the years of international recognition for Ramón, when he lived in El Ventanal, a villa that was built in Estoril with Carmen de Burgos, in Naples and back to Madrid; in Paris, at the Cirque d'Hiver , he gives a lecture on the back of an elephant; at the Circo Americano in Madrid he reads his lecture from a roll of paper, seated on a trapeze elevated above the dance floor.

Theater

He cultivated a highly innovative theatre, close to the surrealist aesthetic, whose best exponent is Los medios seres, which was performed but was not understood by the Madrid public, unaccustomed to avant-garde extravagances.

Essays

The most notable aspect of his essays is the introduction of the European avant-garde in Spain (his book Ismos, for example, which introduced a new word into the Spanish dictionary). He was also interested in traditional Madridism and found a way to renew the costumbrismo that had been used in his description in the metaphor of the Madrid market, to which he dedicated his book El Rastro, where unfortunate objects and abandoned are saved by their lyrical evocation.

Greguerias

Monument dedicated to Ramón Gómez de la Serna in the Jardines de Las Vistillas de Madrid (Enrique Pérez Comendador, 1972).

The greguerías are ingenious sentences, and generally brief, that arise from a casual clash between thought and reality. There is no doubt that Gómez de la Serna was its creator. The author himself defines it schematically as follows:

humorrismor+meta♪ ♪ forra greguer.. ♪ ♪ a{displaystyle humorismo+met{acute {a}}foralongmapsto greguer{acute {iota }a}

The image on which the greguería is based can arise spontaneously, but its linguistic formulation is very elaborate, since it has to synthetically, ingeniously and humorously capture the idea that is to be conveyed.

The surprising effect is obtained through:

1. The visual association of two images: "The moon is the eye of the ox of the night ship."
2. The investment of a logical relationship: "The dust is full of old and forgotten sneezes."
3. The free association of linked concepts: "The pair of eggs we take seems to be twins, and they are neither third cousins."
4. The free association of opposing concepts: "The most important thing of life is not to have died."

Gómez de la Serna dedicated, throughout his life, numerous books to this new genre, which he assiduously cultivated in fixed sections of newspapers and would consecrate him as one of the best-known writers of Spanish letters: Greguerías (1917), Flor de greguerías (1933), Total de greguerías (1955), etc. This genre, in fact, served to renew the stagnant idea of metaphor and poetic image that Spanish literary aesthetics possessed and anticipated Surrealism.

In his prologue to Total de greguerías, he cited the work of authors such as Luciano de Samosata, Horacio, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, Jules Renard, Saint -Pol-Roux, George Santayana, among others.

Novels

The author's creative originality is reflected especially in his eighteen novels, beginning with La viuda blanca y negra, full of the love passion of the Madrid summer, probably begun in 1917 but published in 1921, the same year as the embryonic collection of cases, an antidote to the novel, The Unlikely Doctor. Then come the very avant-garde El Incongruente (1922) and the cosmopolitan El gran hotel (1922). In 1923 four other equally original novels came out: El Chalet de las Rosas, an analysis of criminal psychology located in Madrid's Ciudad Lineal; The Secret of the Aqueduct, which takes place in Segovia; Cinelandia, fantasizing about Hollywood; and La Quinta de Palmyra, located near Lisbon. The most ambitious work of this stage is The Novelist (1925), in which the ability to invent a number of large and short novels is expounded. El torero Caracho (1926) is a grotesque vision of the bullfighting environment, and The Knight of the Gray Mushroom (1928) satirizes the financial world for its vain appearance and superficiality. The typically Ramonian theme of love between man and woman (with the exception of the lesbian couple who ends up finding the Portuguese Palmyra) is resumed in Naples with La mujer de ámbar (1927), in Madrid del Rastro with La Nardo (1930), and in a cubist Paris of Argentine emigrants with Policéfalo y señora (1932). Writing becomes even more experimental in the erotic and surreal novel Rebecca! (1937), followed by another as surreal as it is existentialist, El hombre perdido (1947), which the author defines as 'novel of the nebula'. Gómez de la Serna usually projects his own life fictionalized and disguised as him in the novel. That is why it is worth consulting what he tells in a more conventional, although stylized way, in his autobiography proper, Automoribundia (1948), which highlights the changes of decade and couple in Madrid and the trauma of self- exile in Buenos Aires. The last two novels return to a more popular and simple style to explore nostalgia for the past: Las Tres Gracias (Madrid winter novel) (1949), and Piso bajo (1961).

The best place to find all the novels, with information and evaluations of them, are the four volumes on Novelism of the Complete Works.

The double problem for critics is to define the relationship between greguería and novel, and to decide if the metaphorical and humorous writing that Ramón uses in all genres is compatible with what is understood as a good novel.

Biographies

Ramón Gómez de la Serna was a prolific biographer, and in his work he came to portray himself. The biographical works are chosen by the author for a certain personal affinity.

Dispatch by Ramón Gómez de la Serna at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Madrid).

Works

Some of his works are: