Roads to Glory

CERVANTES (223 pp.)Gary MacEoin Bruce ($3.25).

"Two roads lead to wealth and glory," wrote the author of Don Quixote, "that of letters and that of arms." By 1569, Miguel de Cervantes, 22-year-old son of a footloose, impoverished doctor, had already taken a short stroll down the road of Spanish letters with a sheaf of verses under his arm. Although he managed to get a few of them published, he looked in vain for wealth and glory, finally came to a decision: he would follow both roads and double his chances.

Cervantes soon found himself well started along the road to military adventure. On Oct. 7, 1571, Private Cervantes was aboard a warship in the Spanish and Venetian fleet that sailed into the Gulf of Lepanto and closed with the Ottoman fleet bent on the destruction of Christian power in the Mediterranean. A high fever pinned the gaunt, red-bearded young man to his bunk, but when he heard the battle raging, he threw himself into the fight anyhow.

Cervantes' heroic determination helped Christendom to win one of history's decisive battles; it also got him three musket wounds, and one of them made his left arm useless for life. Later, on his way back to Spain, Moorish pirates captured him and held him for ransom in Algiers.

Jail & Excommunication. Through it all, luckless Cervantes went ahead writing verses, and even formed a literary society in Algiers among his fellow prisoners. But after six years in the army and five years in captivity, he was no nearer to either of his goals than he had been at 22. For his four daring attempts to escape from his Moorish captors, he spent ten months chained in a cell. When the ransom money finally came, he returned to a Spain that had all but forgotten the heroes of Lepanto, and that could not spare him a pension. The 36-year-old veteran settled down to manufacture a blizzard of uninspired poems, unsuccessful plays and a pastoral novel, while his illegitimate daughter, his wife, his mother and his two sisters, all of whom he supported, looked hopefully over his shoulder.

At 40, he tried to crawl from under his burden of debts by taking a job as commissary for the Spanish Armada, only to run into more trouble. When he commandeered church property, he was excommunicated. When the government found discrepancies in his accounts, he was thrown into jail. Out of jail at last, he went ahead with his writing. Finally, at 57, he published Part I of the comic, compassionate masterpiece that was to win him little of the fortune, but all of the glory he thirsted for.

Devotion & Cold Eyes. Writing on a fellowship granted by Catholic Publisher Bruce, Biographer Gary MacEoin (pronounced MacOwen) hammers away determinedly at the contention of such scholars as Spanish Philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset and Princeton Professor Americo Castro that Cervantes was a free-thinking man of the Renaissance who included devout passages in his work only because the cold eye of the Inquisition was on him. To prove his case, he offers dozens of devout quotations from Cervantes' works, and adds that since "not a single line [was] erased by [Inquisition censors] during his lifetime," Cervantes' dedication to Catholicism cannot be questioned. Right or wrong, MacEoin gives over so much of his space to supporting this single thesis that his book often reads more like a religious tract than a dispassionate analysis of Cervantes' life and writings.

A year after the publication of Part II of Don Quixote, Cervantes, 68, and suffering from dropsy, died, taking with him to his grave all but the bare outline of his life. Short of biographical details, Biographer MacEoin has resorted to sifting the collected writings in an effort to separate Cervantes' own experience from the fiction with which he embroidered it. The result, while rich in surmise, is a little thin as biography. After reading Cervantes, those who would like to know its subject better are likely to find themselves right back where they startedstaring into the sad, heroic face of the mad knight who called windmills his enemies and wore a barber's basin as a helmet.

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