Ruidos y susurros de las vanguardias - Medialab Prado

Mercedes Molina Alarcón
What happened to literary circles in cafés? Avant-Garde in the Cafés of
Madrid
"Since Romanticism, it is not possible to talk about literary life in Madrid without
entering a café. Cafés replaced lounges, clubs, social clubs and associations, all
of them crowded by aristocracy and wealthy people who felt proud to socialize
with talents; and by politicians and leaders of all classes, who wished to be the
protagonists of the conspiracy, the creation or the act of society " (César González
Ruano).
The café was, at the same time, the lounge, the club, the association and the
social club of the independent, of the poor. The offer was abundant and varied:
cafés for bullfighters, comedians, writers, painters, and other plastic artists, broke
journalists, starving students…
"Valle Inclán appears in "café de Levante" (located in Puerta del Sol, 5) already
without his arm, with his eternal goatee, always gesticulative, bad-tempered,
spectacular; Jacinto Benavente in the café "El Gato Negro" (located in calle del
Príncipe 1 ), with a moustache and goatee beard and acierated always ready to
put strambotto to a conversation; and around them a heap of bohemians, even a
Mr. Barinaca who assured to have been able to hock a dumb hake " (Pío Baroja).
La Sagrada Cripta de "Pombo"
(Located in calle Carretas, nº 4, nowadays the Council of Presidency)
Ramón Gómez de la Serna pioneered in Spain the avant-garde movements - in
1909, he translated the "Futurist Manifesto", "What Marinetti said before an
automobile we had said it before a safety razor", - and founded the magazine
“Prometeo”. And their literary circle meetings took place around "the sacred crypt
of the café Pombo", also called Saturday literary circle meetings and Pombo
banquets: “romantic dinner”, banquet to "Don Nadie” (- Mr. Nobody -) (with a
beautiful letter by Unamuno), banquet to Ortega y Gasset, cavalcade of the
publishers, disguised as the Three Wise Men…
It was not exactly a literary circle meeting at a café, because conversation with
different points of view was difficult. Most of the time Gómez de la Serna
monopolized the conversation, and during his farewell before leaving to Buenos
Aires, Federico García Lorca played a joke on him, by not letting him talk for the
whole evening, something very difficult for Don Ramón.
Greguerías
Greguería is an ingenious sentence and usually brief which comes by chance
from a casual combination of thinking and reality: "they are only fatal
exclamations of things and soul when they meet by pure chance". The inventor
himself, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, schematically defines them as follows:
Metaphor + Humor = Greguería.
The image on which greguería is based may arise spontaneously, but its linguistic
formulation is very elaborated, because it has to gather synthetically, ingeniously
and humoristically the idea to be transmitted. For that reason Gómez de la Serna,
when talking about his greguerías, said:
"You have to give a brief periodicity to life, you have to give it instantaneity, simple
authenticity, and that spiritual formula that tranquilizes, adjusts, fulfills a
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respiratory and joyful necessity of the spirit is the Greguería. (…) This is the only
thing where I never improvise."
Café Greguerías:
"Against the academic rule I use capital letters with CAFÉ, the lounge, the spiritual
leisure, the place to explain the divine and the human, meeting point with public
life that has the date of our age."
"In the café you can finish with pleasure “the bitter chalice of life”, is a phrase that
will never be more appropriate than before a cup with more coffee than milk".
ULTRAÍSTA EVENINGS
Similar to Dadaists and the first futurism steps, and before the difficulty to show
their work by means of individual works, ultraístas felt attracted by the "direct
action", by the reckless curiosity to personally face the "fierce beast" of the public.
Although among them there was no one with Marinetti 's combative fists or the
impatience of Tristan Tzara, they were seduced by the controversial and
humoristic intervention. Some time before, in 1919, an ultraist evening had been
held in the Ateneo de Sevilla, but in words of Guillermo de Torre "it did not exceed
the characters of one of so many poetic “recitals". In Madrid they aspired to
something different, less protocolic, more surprising and combative, but that spirit
was not achieved, according to Guillermo de Torre: "Hence the disappointment
left by the evenings, due to weakness of those of us who were on the stage as well
as due to the apathy of spectators. Everybody, actors and listeners, were too
serious, without creating the atmosphere of warmth, or better, the controversial
animation we had wished."
"VLTRA is a gust of pure air that enters a rancid sleepy room".
Literary circle meeting of the café Colonial
(located in Puerta del Sol, at the beginning of the calle de Alcalá, nowadays a
take-away food restaurant)
An outstanding moment, in the birth of Ultraism, is represented by a café
dialogue, maintained between Xavier Bóveda and Cansinos Asséns, which was
published as an interview, made by the former to the latter, in the magazine El
Parlamentario and in Cervantes.
Cansinos Asséns, a well-known figure in Madrid literary circles, with his already
profuse work as writer and critic, great scholar and polyglot, organized the literary
circle of the café Colonial, attended by a considerable number of young people
with great artistic concerns. From these meetings, at the end of 1918, appeared
the above mentioned ultraist manifesto and the interview to Xavier Bóveda:
"We met in the Colonial in the evening of our Saturday. Cansinos, as usual, was
punctual.
We talked to him on different matters, especially literature. As our readers know,
Rafael Cansinos Asséns is nowadays the most enjoyable and admirable literary
critic.The old is his obsession, his nightmare, his torment...The old is escaping.”
As a result of this interview the first ultraist manifesto was drafted, with the
intention to exceed in each aesthetic zone the levels reached and always search
for new forms. And this eagerness was so prodigious that the young people of
letters set about the conquest of their objectives. The first step was the publication
of the ULTRAmanifesto, mentioned in almost all the press in Madrid and the main