An Incorruptible Individualist
HINDUS, MILTON
WRITERS and WRITING An Incorruptible Individualist By Milton Hindus Professor of Literature, Brandeis University THE WORKS of Pio Baroja, though some of them have been translated into English,...
...The surgeon Rivera was one of the worst: 'He was a mean and bitter Catalan, a little runt with a tenor's voice, who treated a patient as an enemy...
...but at the outbreak of the Civil War, after being jailed with the village doctor when the Carlists occupied his home town of Vera, it was, ironically, the anti-Marxists from whom he walked away into exile in France...
...They know where they are going, and where they came from...
...All that is left of those graceful spars and masts that fired our enthusiasm are short sticks to hold block and tackle...
...He is decidedly a Spanish writer whose work foreigners ought to look at attentively at least once and possibly more often...
...The road is waiting...
...The Spanish author, he tells us, "was of the party 'of the individual against the State,' and denounced Marxism from the times of his first book...
...Cain is religious, fanatical, and a reactionary idolizer of the gods...
...And among his own eminent countrymen, he has also not been without honor...
...And, as a matter of fact, the longer I have kept reading him the more I have gotten used to his special talents and special limitations...
...With such a method, we should not wonder that the central subject of the book will be either missing or very problematical...
...All three are loosely strung, episodic stories, which depend for their interest upon characters and situations rather than the carefully planned-out and neatly dovetailed series of incidents that makes for a logically compelling "plot...
...Oh, gallant riggings...
...Nowadays it is the machine, an exact, mathematical, measured force, which drives ships...
...He is filled with wonder at its infinite variety, and he inspires us with some of this wonder...
...To take an example: Grass feeds on the earth...
...Pritchett, for example, takes the central subject of Shanti to be something that is indicated by a passage from "The Way I Write": "I can do no less than confess that something definite drove me to publish my little writings: a sense of revenge...
...the sons of well-to-do families become engineers or doctors...
...The end is a point in space and time, and no more transcendental than the point that preceded or follows...
...Herbert Read called Baroja "one of the classics of modern European literature...
...One problem relates to its form, the other to its subject matter...
...and then the grass grows again from the earth...
...If we listen to them, they will tell us: 'Let's not dally to look at the stars or the sea...
...Romantic nostalgia is in the depths of Baroja, but his surface is brightly satiric and bitterly amusing in a way that befits a countryman of Cervantes and Quevedo...
...In Luzaro now, no one cares to go to sea...
...Notably, Jose Ortega y Gasset has said of him: "Baroja is the extraordinarily rare case, unique in my experience, of a man almost entirely constituted of fundamental incorruptibility...
...the steamship is something that changes from day to day, as science does, a piece of machinery in constant transformation...
...And again: "There are only two types within the white race: the round head and the long head—Cain and Abel...
...women eat men...
...Abel is an observer, progressive, does not idolize but studies and contemplates...
...But telling us what his novels do not have helps little in defining the purely formal quality which they do have...
...We run the risk of not getting to the end.' "The end...
...Pio Baroja died in 1956 in his 84th year...
...then, study her with tranquility, and when you get to know her well . . . then you'll find that she no longer means anything at all to you...
...This, underneath his waggish, satiric tone, is the real burden of Baroja's complaint: "Now the sea has changed, and the ships have changed, and the seamen have changed...
...V. S. Pritchett, the British critic, has said flatly that Baroj a's novels "have no plots...
...During the Republic he had been denounced by the Leftist rulers, and thus his record of enforced non-conformism, like Unamuno's, was impartial: 'As writers, we have in Spain not one enemy, but two: the Reds and the Whites.' " Baroja's studies were medical, and Kerrigan goes on to tell us that "in later life Baroja hounded the memory of his ex-professors unmercifully...
...Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer has no plot, nor does Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, but neither of these books has very much in common with this work of Baroja's...
...The slight thing which they do have in common is peripheral rather than esthetically central...
...Cain is savage, Abel civilized...
...The dust jacket of his new book, The Restlessness of Shanti Artdia (University of Michigan...
...And yet...
...of the complicated classic maneuvers nothing is left...
...The sailing ship was like a divine creation, something like a religion or a poem...
...His form is that of a man who lazily circles above life without ever really pouncing down upon it...
...before, it was the wind, something capricious, impalpable, outside and beyond man...
...Below him is not One Big Truth, but a whole lot of little truths which he enjoys picking off in short, pithy passages: "If you want to know what a woman is like, the first thing is to avoid falling in love with her...
...In the sketch, "The Way I Write," which is included in this book, the character who is a writer quotes his father, whom he describes as "an original man": "Every natural, social or political condition among men or animals—and even the ants have religion and politics—is a point on a circumference, related to a point higher up and one lower down, or, if you like, a point on the left and another on the right...
...What an illusion...
...Now this is undoubtedly helpful in establishing the general motivation of a work like Shanti, but more specifically I should like to suggest that the book's theme, which is reflected both in its title and its ending, is the romantic celebration of past times...
...The long head, Abel, is tranquil, placid, intelligent, agricultural, a mathematician, a man of science...
...They are as consistent as the steel in a broken or rusted compass...
...There are two problems, as I see it, with regard to the title-piece of this collection, "The Restlessness of Shanti Andia...
...and everybody is devoured by the earth...
...Such is the ending of The Restlessness of Shanti Andia, and I found it touching in a melancholy way...
...And yet...
...6.50), quotes Hemingway's comment that Baroja deserved the Nobel Prize in literature more than he did...
...But an anonymous note in the Encyclopaedia Britannica has a less inviting description of him: "Impersonal, pessimistic and chillingly intellectual, Baroja deals by preference with the rebels and pariahs of the world...
...And at the conclusion of the book, there are to be found these nostalgic tonalities: "Sometimes I have wondered if any of my sons will turn out to be a sailor or an adventurer...
...Even in these habits he proved himself niggardly, for he gave a very short point to the pencils and he cut the paper very small...
...The satire is particularly marked in the numerous character sketches with which the book is sprinkled: "The chief clerk, a gossipy chap from Jerez who knew Cepeda well, used to say that his employer spent his time cutting up paper for the toilet or sharpening pencils as slowly as possible so that he might appear as a continually busy person in the eyes of his family...
...Haughty frigates, with prows on high and a figurehead on the cutwater ! Round hookers, swift-sailing brigantines ! How sad it is to think you will all disappear, that you will soon no longer be seen ! "Yes, I am happy that my sons will not be seamen...
...To the palate unused to him he tastes dry and has a strange bouquet, but the strangeness wears off and the acquired taste may finally outlast others that are more immediately exciting...
...I can reveal that my family genealogical tree is a hoax and that the ancestors of the Fumiradas were simply a set of bums and hungry tramps...
...the ants eat the lice...
...Now he comes to us with very strong recommendations indeed...
...The famous Letamendi was an arrant plagiarist...
...Anthony Kerrigan's introduction to his translation of Baroja is interesting and informative...
...the grass is eaten by plant lice...
...Each step along the way of life has already been counted and calculated...
...Compare the motif of this passage with one attributed to the narrator of The Restlessness of Shanti Andia: "The majority of men are very proud of their constancy, of the steadfastness of their plans...
...White, white sails...
...The captain was formerly a wise man, a tyrant with unlimited power, a man who had to be sufficient unto himself...
...The relativism of this view, which must have made him sympathetic to Ortega and which is antipathetic to those finalities of which plots and other traditional esthetic conventions of fiction are composed, is the basis of Baroja's artistic technique...
...and Baroja commenced the practical and polemical side of his own writing career by running down, for purposes of ridicule, the originals whence the pedant plagiarized his observations and anecdotes...
...I have searched for signs in them of a sailor's devotion to the sea...
...After watching him operate, it would have given anyone great pleasure to operate on him.' The professor of therapy was simply 'crazy': since he himself was 'sallow, dark, and skinnny, he thought that anyone who did not look the same was made up to deceive the world.' Except for one good man—who was surely a Jew—the doctors were all either 'wild bears,' 'madmen,' 'humbugs' or 'sugary cuckoos.' " Such an introduction to a writer is one that I find appetizing...
...it's best not to get distracted...
...He died in a brothel...
...The Basques are retiring from the sea...
...men eat the chickens...
...WRITERS and WRITING An Incorruptible Individualist By Milton Hindus Professor of Literature, Brandeis University THE WORKS of Pio Baroja, though some of them have been translated into English, are little known to readers in our country...
...today he is a specialist grafted to a bureaucrat...
...The figure which I myself find helpful in thinking of his work is the circle...
...The round head, Cain, is violent, proud, restless, somber, a miner and burrower in the earth, fond of music...
...So the way I imagine everything, though it might not be correct in all particulars, is in the form of a circle, and in any direction you look you'll find circles, circles everywhere...
...But no, they have no inclination for the mariner's lot, and I am happy...
...chickens eat the ants...
...What has become of all of yesterday's glory, adventure, valor, beauty, in our drab, mechanized modern world...
...There is no end in life...
Vol. 43 • January 1960 • No. 1
