Introduction

Summary

The great Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote that modernity spoke through Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Madrid, 1888–Buenos Aires, 1963) and, at least between the two world wars, Ramón was unanimously considered the most representative avant-garde writer in Spanish literature (‘Una de cal …’, 175). Indeed, he should be placed among the greatest artists, not just writers, of the first third of the twentieth century, one of the most fruitful periods of Spanish culture. Yet, Paz lamented the forgetfulness and lack of recognition of an entire Hispanic world, on both sides of the Atlantic, which had learned so much from him. This double circumstance brings us to the first of a long series of paradoxes that characterise the work and figure of Gómez de la Serna. If he was, and this is unquestionable, as I will show, one of the champions of the renewal of literature in the Spanish language between 1908 and 1936 (at least), how might we explain that lack of definitive recognition? A first clarification, which delays and makes the answer a little more complex, is that, in spite of his avant-garde credentials, we are not dealing with an elitist, obscure or difficult-to-read writer – quite the contrary. During the years from 1910 to at least the end of the 1940s, Gómez de la Serna knew how to combine, in a very personal recipe, features of all the advanced forms of literature appearing all over Europe – sometimes anticipating them – with a constant presence in the mass media, including radio, newspapers and intellectual magazines, but also humorous or entertaining periodicals. Thus, he coexisted with Cubism, Futurism, Imaginism and Surrealism, but he used and parodied popular literary genres and even managed to become famous enough to be considered a real celebrity – something relatively exceptional for a writer at the time. In fact, he liked to remember, probably exaggerating, that if he was saved from being shot by a group of anarchists at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, in July 1936, it was because when they heard his voice, they recognised him as ‘the one who speaks on the radio on Sundays. Let him come in’ (Oc, XX, 700).