Recently I have forsaken Gómez de la Serna and had the temerity to write two books on Cervantes. But I was led to reread Cervantes in order to assess what Ramón had done when he edited a much-abbreviated edition, without scholarly apparatus, of Don Quixote in 1947, a copy of which I consulted in the Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid) in the late 1990s. I was intrigued by the apparent paradox that he had edited Don Quixote but had never written a biography or even a portrait of Cervantes, among the many he wrote on other writers and painters. That edition must have been commissioned by the Mexican publisher to coincide with the tercentenary celebrations of the birth of Cervantes, but its appearance went unremarked in the pioneering bibliographies of Rodolfo Cardona and Gaspar Gómez de la Serna. Unknown to me, it was discussed in a virtually inaccessible paper given by Luis López Molina in Switzerland (1995). The oddity is that Ramón had not bothered to compose anything new in his introduction to the edition; he had simply reproduced the only thing he had ever written on Cervantes and Don Quixote, which was a chapter in his biography of Lope de Vega. This suggests his interest in doing an edition was merely commercial, a more attractive proposition than producing blurbs to eke out the extra income he so badly needed in his life in Buenos Aires in the 1940s. I shall return to that introduction later.

The current state of play as regards Ramón and Cervantes, at least in my mind, remains more or less as follows. The seventeen-year-old Ramón entered the literary fray in 1905 with Entrando en fuego containing a cautionary tale, ‘¡Loco!’ (18–20), about a young friend gone mad lecturing about utopia. It was the same year as the tercentenary of the first Quixote, celebrated not by Ramón but by his elders such as Azorín and Unamuno, whom he derided as ‘prohombrillos’ (public figures of minor importance) (81) in his second book, Morbideces. There he makes no mention of Cervantes, yet all the reading and citations of other authors he has struggled with have driven him not quite as mad as Don Quixote, but to a state where he needs to empty his mind and enjoy a brainless ecstasy, ‘éxtasis descerebrado’ (17, 101).