Flight of the Disenchanted

By Walter Borenstein

The two novels tell the story of Mara and her widowed father, Enrique Aracil, a physician, from her earliest years, sharing her life with family members and growing into womanhood. Her fathers involvement with the anarchist movement brings him in contact with a young fanatic Nilo Brull, who fails in a desperate attempt to assassinate the young king and his bride, throwing a bomb at their open carriage on their wedding day. Aracil is accused of abetting the bomber, and he and his daughter are forced to flee Madrid.

The first novel follows the pair as they travel on foot and later on horseback through the countryside west of the city on their way to Portugal. The author describes in great detail all their adventures as they move from one town to the next, staying at inns and meeting the many characters on their way. It ends with their voyage by sea from Portugal to London.

The second novel describes their stay in London, at a pension in Bloomsbury, and the various people they encounter while they remain in London. Baroja reveals the influence of his favorite author, Charles Dickens, throughout many picturesque scenes.

When they consider its safe to return to Spain, they sail back, and Marie ends up marrying her cousin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543457933

Walter Borenstein

Walter Borenstein is an Emeritus Professor of Spanish at SUNY New Paltz. He taught classes in Spanish language, culture and literature, as well as some in the Latin language at the University of Illinois, L.S.U., Cornell College, Iowa, and SUNY New Paltz. He is the author of numerous articles on Spanish literature. He has devoted his time since retirement to translating Spanish novels and has published five book, novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán, Pío Baroja, Azorín and Gabriel Miró.

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Copyright © 2017 by Walter Borenstein.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

I. Pío Baroja

II. His Life

III. His Works

Acknowledgments

THE WANDERING LADY

Prologue

I   Grandma

II   The Man Behind The Mask

III   Cousin Benedicto

Iv   Friendship

V   Anarchism And Rhetoric

VI   Dangerous Pretenders

VII   The End Of A Romantic Society

VIII   The Terrible Day

IX   In La Bombilla

X   Looking For A Way Through

XI   What The Newspapers Said

XII   Brull’s Farewell

XIII   The Departure

XIV   They Draw Away From Madrid

XV   San Juan De Los Pastores

XVI   The Inn Of Hunger

XVII   La Gila

XVIII   Sacred Property

XIX   El Grillo’s Bets

XX   The Man On The Black Horse And The White Dog

XXI   Our Lady Of Chilla

XXII   The Legend Of Chilla, According To Aracil

XXIII   In Search Of Them

XXIV   The Serrana From La Vera

XXV   The Death Of The Horse

XXVI   El Musiú

XXVII   Flight By Night

XXVIII   In Portugal

XXIX   They Rest

XXX   They Depart

XXXI   At Sea

THE CITY OF FOG

FIRST PART:   TORTUOUS PATHS

First Chapter   

In Sight Of England

Chapter II   Bloomsbury

Chapter III   The Wandering Lady

Chapter Iv   Mister Roche

Chapter V   Wanda’s House

Chapter VI   An Unexpected VIsitor

Chapter VII   One Clear Sunday

Chapter VIII   Mister Roche’s Explanations

Chapter IX   My Father’s Solution

Chapter X   The Tortuous Path

Chapter XI   The Pension

SECOND PART:   DISILLUSIONMENTS

Now The Author….

First Chapter   A Poor Neighborhood

Chapter II   Hardships In The Fog

Chapter III   Baltasar The Anarchist

Chapter Iv   Extraordinary Philosophy Of A Hairdresser

Chapter V   EnVIrons Of Covent Gardens

Chapter VI   Dickson, Mantz And Company

Chapter VII   The Woman Under Glass

Chapter VIII   Busy People

Chapter IX   The Garden In Saint Giles In The Fields

Chapter X   The Jew’s House

Chapter XI   Captain Black’s Project

Chapter XII   Springtime Illusion

Chapter XIII   A Night Of Emotions

Chapter XIV   Trust Or Prudence

Chapter XV   A Bad Night

Chapter XVI   A Tired Race

Chapter XVII   Happy, Almost Sad Epilogue

Notes

INTRODUCTION

I. Pío Baroja

In a later edition of The Wandering Lady, Pío Baroja wrote, The ephemeral character of my work does not displease me. We are men of the present day, people of the moment that is passing, of what is fleeting, of what is transitory, and whether our work is lasting or not troubles us very little, so little that it almost doesn’t trouble us at all.¹ In many of his novels and essays, he has boldly asserted that he is indifferent to praise and honors, that he is a man who is humble and errant² He takes it as a badge of honor that, ever since childhood, it was said of him, You will never amount to anything.³ In much of his writing, he has bitterly denounced pretentiousness, self-aggrandizement, arrogance and vanity. His strained relationship with his fellow Basque Miguel de Unamuno was always troubled by the latter’s constant striving for recognition and glory.

Baroja revealed some of these feelings in his comments on the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the first volume of his memoirs, written in 1952, he wrote, I never believed they were going to give me the Nobel Prize. He thought he did not have the reputation or personal influence needed and that there was really no way to measure literary merit. He concluded by saying that he was a writer like those who live in a penumbra that lasts for a while, until they begin to get lost in the darkness and probably in oblivion after that.⁴ But he did include his own name on a list of fourteen writers who did not receive the prize and were more deserving than the fourteen listed as receiving it He included Hardy, Rilke, Proust, Zola, Gide, Tolstoi and Gorki. His nephew, the writer Pío Caro Baroja, wrote of his uncle, If he had written in French, he would be a Nobel Prize winner forty years ago; if he had written in English, he would be a millionaire forty times over; but he is Spanish, and ‘in Spain—as Larra says— to write is to weep.’ Shortly thereafter, when Ernest Hemingway was visiting Baroja during his last days, he said that he greatly admired him and his work and that Baroja deserved the Nobel Prize far more than he did.

When one reads most of the novels and essays Baroja wrote, one is immediately aware that one must not take what he says at any given time as the final word and the essence of his philosophy. I discovered this when I was writing my doctoral dissertation and gave it the title Pío Baroja: His Contradictory Philosophy.⁶ The author was torn by a desire to present a self-concept as a man of action, cruel, selfish, vain, cynical and indifferent to human suffering, in conflict with the humane and sensitive man he truly was, who couldn’t bear to witness the reality around him.

II. His Life

There are few writers who have written as much about their life, their ideas and their relationships with other people as Pío Baroja. Not only did he write numerous articles and collections of essays over the years concerning himself, as well as his seven volumes of Memoirs completed between 1944 and 1952,⁷ but he filled his many novels with characters who represented the various stages of his life, and interrupted his fictional works as an ever present narrator to offer his opinions on an endless number of subjects.

In order to acquire an understanding of the first five years of Baroja’s life, it is hardly necessary to search for the best biography available. In the second volume of his Memoirs, in Family, Childhood and Youth,⁸ he offers the reader a detailed autobiography of his life from his birth in 1872 to the time when he decided to follow a career in writing in 1898.

He offers us sixty-four pages of family background in the first chapter alone, entitled Family, before he even informs us of the place and date of his birth. Here he gives the reader an idea of what is of prime importance for him: race. He writes, Race interests me very much, as much in man as in animals.⁹ He was born at a time when the anthropologists, the sociologists and scientists who followed Charles Darwin were stressing the importance of race as a major factor in the study of mankind. He was attracted to what some called the anthropo-racial, selectionist. hereditarist school The men who represented this orientation were Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82), Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1926), G.V. de Lapouge, Otto Ammon and others. These men developed theories of racial superiority and inferiority. Chamberlain was a major spokesman for the school, believing that the various races are different, that there are superior and inferior races, that the difference is not due to environment, but is innate. From this view arose an idea that the white race is inherently superior, and especially Nordic and Aryan people. Both Gobineau and Chamberlain singled out the Jewish race as having a pernicious influence on civilization, calling them aliens among all people." Baroja himself adopted many of these racist views reflected here in his Memoirs where he discusses his own family background and he puts many of these ideas into the mouths of many of the characters in his novels as well as the mouth of the narrator in these works.

He was born in the ciy of San Sebastián in the province of Guipucoa, a Basque coastal city on December 28, 1872. His father Serafín Baroja y Zornosa, was an engineer with some literary pretensions. He was exposed to the many romantic books in his father’s library and contributed to his love of the adventure story and works of contemporary social and philosophical concerns. He felt he had inherited his artistic temperament and jovial character from his father

From his mother Doña Carmen Nessi y Godí, whose family was from Lombardy, he inherited a spiritual, uneasy and turbulent character, a tendency toward skepticism, kindliness, hopelessness and despair. A bachelor, he lived with his mother in Madrid from 1902 till her death in 1935. Following his father’s death in 1912, he bought a summer home in Vera de Bidasoa in the Basque provinces and spent his summers there for many years.

He had vague memories of the last Carlist War and used them in many of his novels. They imbued in him a deeply romantic sensitivity and a sense of the ridiculous and the grandiose and he spoke of men defending causes they do not believe in, attacking beliefs they do not disbelieve, or even worse, men refusing to defend or practice what they do believe.¹⁰

His family moved to Madrid in 1879 and from there to Pamplona in 1881, and returned to Madrid in 1884, where he received a degree in 1886. These years appear in a number of his early novels. He became interested in medicine and studied in Valencia in Valencia and Madrid and received a doctorate in 1893 with a thesis on pain. He soon lost interest in medicine after practicing for a short time and began a career in writing. He would roam the streets of the city, familiarizing himself with the places that would fill his novels. Among his favorite novelists was Charles Dickens.

His interest in philosophy kept growing and he read Kant, Fichte and Schopenhauer and developed ideas that would characterize the Generation of 1898, of which he was to be an integral part. He started reading works of Nietzsche and Darwin, which had a great influence on his writing.

After abandoning his medical practice in Cestona in Basque country, he moved to Madrid in 1896 to help his brother Ricardo operate a family business, a bakery on the Calle de Misericordia in Madrid. It was here that Baroja became acquainted with the poorer classes that filled what was perhaps his outstanding work, the trilogy La luchja por la vida. John Dos Passos, in his significant work on Spain, Rosinante to the Road Again, tells us of these "loafers and wanderers…, his artists and grotesque dreamers and fanatics…, descendants of the people in the Quixote and Novelas ejemplares…, Of the rogues and bandits of the Lazarillo de Tormes"¹¹ He sees these characters of Baroja, drawn from his life, as men who have not had the willpower to continue in the fight for bread, whose nerve has failed, who live furtively on the outskirts, snatching a little joy here and there, drugging their hunger with grotesque mirages.¹²

He had written some short pieces in a number of Basque journals, but his story Bondad oculta in the magazine Germinal can be said to be his introduction to the world of writing. At his time he made a number of trips in Europe, mainly to Paris, and these had a major influence on him as a writer and a thinker. One critic saw him as the universal Basque looking out over the world by a Spanish route; and, at the same time, an implacable observer of his native land from foreign watchtowers.¹³ In 1900, he published his first major work, a collection of short stories. He had now truly embarked on a literary career.

He had been living in Madrid since 1902 in a house on the Calle de Mendizábal, number 34, with his parents. Eventually his whole family was to occupy three floors of the building. His sister Carmen and his brother Ricardo was now an artistic circle, a cultural center for their brother’s literary world. He continued his travels, to London in 1906, Florence in 1907, Rome in 1908, and later to Switzerland. His sister’s husband, whom she married in 1913, Rafael Caro Raggio, would be the publisher of many of his works. This press exists to this day and publishes many works of the Baroja family.

The years preceding the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) were relatively peaceful and he continued to publish novels and other works. While in Madrid, he would live ritualized life in a simple milieu between the Banco de España and the Puerta del Sol, along the Calle de Alcalá and the Carrera de San Jerónimo. He would meet with the same people and do the same things. The dictatorial era of Primo de Rivera (1923-30) would force hos friend and compatriot Miguel de Unamuno into exile but did little to change Baroja’s life.

The fall of the monarchy and the beginning and the beginning of the Spanish Republic in 1931 found him to be an enemy of both extremes, the monarchists and republicans. He followed neither direction. Anthony Kerrigan said of him, Baroja, far from being a socialist, was not even a believer in democracy…. He had concerned himself…with rebels and been the associate of socialist romantics and anarchist conspirators.¹⁴ He had often referred to himself as a radical liberal, an individualist and even an anarchist. He had seen himself as an enemy of the Church; then of the State; while these two great powers are in conflict, he wrote, I am a partisan of the State against the Church; the day the State prevails, I’m an enemy of the State.¹⁵

He was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 1934, to the chagrin of his enemies on the left and the right. His mother died in 1935, and shortly after, the civil war erupted, and it would last until 1939. He was at his summer home in Vera de Bidasoa and was barely able to escape with his life after being captured by rebel sympathizers who saw him as an enemy of their cause. He was released after the intervention of a family friend and made his way on foot over the mountains into France where he set up his residence. He made one secret visit to Spain while in exile and finally fled the oncoming German army in 1940, to a war-ravaged society.

He rented an apartment on the Calle de Ruiz de Alarcón, Number 12, near the Prado Museum. He continued to write, now under the suspicious and antagonistic eye of the censors. His sister Carmen died in 1953 and his brother Ricardo shortly after. He lived with his nephew Julio Caro Baroja, the famous anthropologist for his remaining years.

He worked on his memoirs, which was published in eight volumes. His health was deteriorating rapidly and he suffered from arteriosclerosis. He fractured a femur in May 1956 and was even bedridden. He received many visits, from young admirers. A final visit was from Ernest Hemingway, a long-time admirer, who remarked that he considered the aged writer more worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature than he, who had already received it. Baroja had always been very cynical about the prize and, after all, Benito Pérez Galdós, perhaps Spain’s greatest writer, had never received it either.

Pío Baroja died on October 30, 1956 at the age of eighty-three. He was buried in the Cementerio Civil del Este in Madrid, not far from the graves of Nicolás Salmerón, a president of the first Spanish Republic, and Pablo Iglesias, a leading Socialist political leader. Anthony Kerrigan wrote of him, Death, if less facetious than life, again proved equally as ironic, circumstantial and just; its justice, hurried and rather sarcastic, was a poetic justice.¹⁶ He concluded, If the three men had nothing else in common, they were astoundingly alike in their virtue, in perhaps the most sacred of virtues: they had been incorruptible in life.¹⁷

III. His Works

Baroja wrote a great deal about the nature of his own work. In 1953, shortly before he died, he wrote, Sometimes you make up a novel to your taste, about love and intrigues, with the supposition that was initiated so energetically and then passed on like a cloud carried off by the wind, without leaving any trace whatsoever, had its development, its denouement, its outcome in time.¹⁸ He concludes, What difference does it make? Thousands of projects, empty and inferior, about intrigues and machinations, that have no purpose… dissolve in the air and leave nothing more behind them than a flimsy cloud of melancholy….¹⁹

Some critics in Spain and abroad have bitterly denounced his writing, his indifference to grammar, style and structure. Federico de Onís defended him saying, it is therefore idle to seek in his novels a harmonious structure, orderly, rounded and complete. For the spirit of Baroja is as errant as that of his characters; he loves digressing; he delights in details. And in this very fact lies his originality and charm.²⁰ His apparent defects constitute his never-to-be forgotten enchantment.

C,J. Brown argued that Baroja believed that art is vastly inferior to life, and should therefore be based on observation of life…, that style is ideally a matter of expressing oneself briefly, directly and exactly; and the novel is a shapeless, informal genre which should be judged on the strength of its capacity to entertain the reader."²¹ Some of his most bitter critics believed his philosophy of life led him to have a literary tendency that was both shallow and naïve. Others felt his Basque education had tainted his use of the Castilian language. Salvador Madariaga defended his writing saying that he came to write his novels in a disconnected succession of short episodes, having no particular rhythm or shape, beginning just anywhere and ending just any way, having no other relations than those between the characters which run through them….²²

William A. Drake argues that Baroja’s style is acrid, economical to rigidity, almost6 brusquely direct, and innocent of the rhetorical subtleties and the finished periods hallowed by his forebears and assiduously cultivated by most of his contemporaries.²³ The novelist Ramón Sender said In his vast work there is not a single rhetorical phrase. He wrote in an oral, careless and direct manner and said lively, original and deep things with frequent errors in syntax.²⁴ Anthony Kerrigan argued there is no ‘style’ in Baroja. His style being a contempt to bypass rhetoric in a driving attempt to get at the things described.²⁵ He adds that the author achieves his dramatic end by understatement, he communicates to the reader by what is unsaid, and that his visual approach is that of an artist filling his sketchbook.

Baroja’s novelistic output covered more than half a century, offering his reader a vast panoramic vision of Spanish society. His predecessor Benito Pérez Galdós had done this for the second half of the 19th century. Baroja wrote thirty-one novels in trilogies, His first trilogy, written between 1900 and 1909 was called Tierra vasca. His second, La vida fantástica was written between 1901 and 1906. His most famous work La lucha por la vida, the three novels of which were translated into English by Isaac Goldberg between 1922 and 1924, guaranteed his reputation as a novelist. The trilogies that followed were El pasado, La raza, Las ciudades, El mar, Agonías de nuestro tiempo, La juventud perdida, and a final series, Saturnales. His historical work Memorias de un hombre de acción consisted of twenty-two novels and were written between 1913 and 1935.

After the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, Baroja’s works were suppressed in a number of ways. In spite of this, it was announced in 1946 that his Obras completes would be published in a hard-cover, leather-bound de-luxe edition. The eight volumes were published between 1946 and 1951, It did not take long to discover that many of the works had been expurgated. The most serious changes and omissions were in his novel Camino de perfección. In my own translation of this novel published in 2008, I devote several pages to a discussion of this censorship.²⁶ However, these volumes offer the most complete collection of his essays and articles in Volumes V and VIII.

The seven volumes of his memoirs, Desde la última vuelta del camino. Were begun in 1944 and finished in 1949. He is also the author of a small number of dramatic works, a biography and one book of poetry/

The author’s novels written between 11900 and 1927 have served as the basis for most of the critical work concerning him, and those written before 1912 were the basis of most of them. Other critics include Ernest Boyd who wrote, His power resides in the lines of an etcher bitten with acid—the acid of an ironical and pessimistic humor. The logical end of the lawless world surveyed by Baroja is anarchy.²⁷ Salvador Madariaga commented, In renouncing most of the attractive methods of literary art, he has gained a freer scope for the intensity and power of his vision. The resultis a writing which for directness and simplicity has no rival in Spain.²⁸ John Dos Passos wrote, Baroja is a great novelist, not only in his time, on railway bookstalls and in editorial offices, but in that vigorous animation of life and events that…people…call literature.²⁹ Dwight Bolinger compared the author’s career to the three stages in the lives of his heroes, At the first, enthusiasm for action, and heroes who sweep all opposition before them, then doubt, and semi-heroes who start well but end in failure; and at the last disillusionment, and men who are endowed like heroes but see the futility of heroics, and do not even make a beginning in action.³⁰

V.S. Pritchett forcefully says: He set down his brief lives of people and families, recording their hopes, errors, pretenses and fates, with sardonic precision….No idea forces daily life into some pattern of value or moral struggle, unless it is pity for illusion. He concludes, He is an anarchist. Society is disagreeable. He looks for the inexplicable outbreak in human character…. For Baroja, the core of difference in us is the very source of life. He is interested in what is unanswerably ourselves.³¹ Sherman E. Eoff saw Baroja as a spokesman of his age, very subjective, who reveals his intense loneliness. The reader follows his restless journey, recognizes his dissatisfaction with human society. He concludes, The novelist’s outlook, in fact, appears to be an all-inclusive pessimism impregnated with a paralyzing doubt growing out of the scientific and philosophical literature of the nineteenth century.

Baroja’s negativism may have arisen, not fro his awareness of the social injustice that surrounded him, as from his low esteem of mankind. The human race, in a Darwinian sense, was engaged in a struggle one of his characters considers somewhat painful, empty and absurd. Baroja was a ma filled with contradictions, in which flashes of faith are dashed to pieces by fits of weakness or compassion. His heroes turn out to be heroes fracasados (failed heroes), oppressed by an inevitable abulia. One of his protagonists says that some spring has broken in my life. In the struggle for life," his heroes invariably fail. Pity and humanitarianism lead them to inevitable failure, most obviously when situations call for indifference and even cruelty. Some heroes refuse to enter the fray, others participate and fall by the wayside, and some watch the struggle from afar, unable to compete in the struggle for life. He once commented that he would have never felt the need to write novels if he had been able to undertake the struggle itself. Doomed to contradiction, he is at once a sentimental and intellectual anarchist and an elitist reactionary, an aristocratic nihilist and a man in love with a suffering people.

Many critics have tried to define the man and his work. One has come to the best conclusion. Ernesto Giménez Caballero may have come closest to the truth when he wrote, There is really no way to dissect Baroja. He is elusive and squirms about like a fish. He is in constant movement, going voluptuously back and forth…and one sets out suggestively after him, without ever knowing where he may stop, as he passes through the magic depths that are always new.⁴¹

Roberta Johnson wrote of Baroja, referring to his influence on the many younger writers who followed him, saying that he provided a model for their own attempts to re-create in fiction their frustrations and disillusionment. She concludes, Although the perspective of the twenty-first century may ultimately determine otherwise, at present Baroja remains Spain’s foremost novelist of the twentieth century. His is the largest and most sustained body of fiction to deal in a significant way with the complexities of modern life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began work on this translation some ten years ago and completed it in 2011. I tried to find a publisher beginning in May 2011 and wrote to 21 publishers. I received no reply from almost all of them. This came as a surprise to me because in earlier years I would often receive personal responses from editors. These two novels are the second work of Pío Baroja that I have translated. The first, Road to Perfection, was published in 2008 in Oxford, England. I turned 90 this past spring and realized that I would have to have it published myself if it were ever to see the light of day. I still have a number of unpublished novels by peninsular Spanish writers, and I fear that they will disappear when I do. This is a sorry state of affairs. If a writer of the reputation and importance of Pío Baroja must go begging for a publisher in English, then the world has come to a dismal point. Be that as it may, I will now go ahead with my own publication of this work.

THE WANDERING LADY

By Pío Baroja

Translated by Walter Borenstein

PROLOGUE

I am not very much in favor of talking about myself; this seems to me entirely too pleasant for the one who is writing and exceedingly unpleasant for the one who is reading; but since this Library is asking me for a prologue, I will interrupt my customary habit of not giving egotistical explanations or clarifications and, this one time, I will surrender myself to the voluptuous feeling of saying I to the point of overdoing it.

It would be stupidly modest, for my part, for me to affirm that what I am writing isn’t worth anything; if I were to believe that, I wouldn’t be writing it.

If I were to suppose, then, that there is something of value in my literary work—just as someone supposes at times that a theorem is resolved beforehand—I’m going to say, with a minimum of modesty, what to my way of thinking, can be the value or merit of my books.

I believe that the value is not precisely literary or philosophical; it is rather psychological and documentary. Although nowadays there is a tendency on the part of the majority of anthropologists to give hardly any importance to race and give a great deal to culture,¹ I, out of feeling rather than anything else, am inclined to think that the ethnic element, however distant, is transcendental in the formation of individual character.

Through my ancestry, I am a mixture of Basque and Lombard; seven-eighths Basque, one-eighth Lombard.²

I don’t know whether this Lombard element (a Lombard is of Saxon origin, according to what historians say) may have influenced me; but, undoubtedly, the Basque base has had an influence, giving me a spiritual, uneasy and turbulent foundation.

Nietzsche has insisted emphatically on the difference between the Apollonian type (bright, luminous, harmonious), and the Dionysian type (dark, vehement, disordered). Whether I want it or not, I am a Dionysian.

This Dionysian foundation impels me to a love of action, dynamism and drama. The turbulent tendency prevents me from being a tranquil and contemplative, and since I am not like that, I unconsciously have to deform the things I see, out of a desire to take control of them, out of an instinct for possession, contrary to contemplation.

At the same time as this tendency toward turbulence and for action—in art I logically have to be a great admirer of Goya, and in music of Beethoven—I spontaneously believe I feel a great ethical aspiration. Perhaps the Lombard in me appears here.

This aspiration, joined to my turbulence, has made me be a fanatical enemy of the past, and in so being, anti-historical, anti-rhetorical and anti-traditionalist.

An ethical preoccupation has isolated me from the Spanish milieu, converting me into one of so many solitaries, recluses,³ in a sack coat and a derby hat, who inhabit our cities.

Since Spain and almost all the other countries have their artistic sphere, occupied almost entirely by competent people and by humbugs, when I began to write, they tried to see in me not a sincere man, but a competent imitator taking on someone else’s literary posture.

Many sought an affiliation and a formula for me. According to some, I had successively picked apart the works of Voltaire, Fielding, Balzac, Zola, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Poe, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Maeterlinck,⁴ Mirbeau,⁵ France, Kropotkin, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Hauptmann, Korolenko,⁶ Mark Twain, Galdós, Ganivet⁷ and a dozen more, and, above all, Gorky. As for this last one, considering me a pseudo-Gorki was principally owed to the fact that I was the first one, or one of the first, to write an article in Spanish concerning this Russian writer.⁸

That I would present to the public who were going to read me a writer who was plundering the work of others was truly imputing too much ingenuousness and too little malice in me. Of course, since I neither plundered his work nor followed in his path, I didn’t very much care whether Gorki was well known in Spain. I’ve never concealed my admirations in literature. They’ve been and still are: Dickens, Balzac, Poe, Dostoyevsky and, now, Stendhal. A critic is generally not satisfied with what a writer says to him. He assumes that the writer always has to speak with malice and conceal something, which shows that one has to move through many layers of incomprehension just to be heard.

I don’t mean to say that there are no influences or imitations in my books: there are some as in all books; what there isn’t is a deliberate imitation, a furtive exploitation of someone else’s thought. There is, for example, in a novel of mine: The House of Aizgorri, a reminiscence, as they say, of The Intruder by Maeterlinck.⁹ Nevertheless, I haven’t read The Intruder, neither before nor afterward; and so then how can one explain the vague imitation?

It can be explained in a very simple way. Before writing my book, I had heard some literary people speak of The Intruder, about its plot, about its scenes. Without knowing it, I apparently appropriated the impression reflected on a Spaniard by the drama of the Belgian author, and I will consider it mine; but I am sure that anyone who would compare the two works thoroughly would not find a single sentence, a formula, nothing at all like that, which would indicate that I may have followed Maeterlinck in my thought; because I didn’t know him, and he has been of no interest to me since. It is the atmosphere, many times, that makes the two works similar.

If I had written this same novel: The House of Aizgorri after Electra, by Pérez Galdós,¹⁰ if I had written The Quest after The Mob by Blasco Ibáñez,¹¹ and Paradox, the King after The Island of the Penguins by Anatole France¹² they would have accused me of being an imitator, because there is a great similarity between these works and mine, and, probably more than between The House of Aizgorri and The Intruder, but I wrote them before. None the less, it never occurred to me to say that those authors had imitated me, but rather that they had coincided with me, and had coincided with greater success, because the three works of those authors were applauded and mine had hopelessly failed.

Setting aside this purely literary question, I will continue with my self-analysis, more interesting to me. I said that I am an anti-traditionalist and an enemy of the past, and that’s what I actually am, because all pasts, and in particular the Spanish past, because it’s the one that most preoccupies me, do not seem so splendid to me, but rather dark, gloomy, with little humanity.

I can’t explain, and I probably don’t understand the merit of the Spanish writers of the XVIIth century; nor do I understand the enchantment with the French classics, with the exception of Molière.

Out of this antipathy for the past, complicated by a lack of idiomatic feeling—because I am a Basque and neither my ancestors nor I ever spoke Castilian¹³—rises the repugnance inspired in me by rhetorical ostentation, which seem like cemetery decorations, rancid things, that smell of the dead. This aggregate of instinctive peculiarities: turbulence, ethical aspiration, dynamism, the desire to possess things and ideas, the fervor for action, the hatred for the inert and an enthusiasm for the future, form the foundation of my literary temperament, if it is all possible to call a temperament like that literary, which, built on a foundation of energy, would be more like that of an agitator than anything else.

I don’t consider these conditions to be excellent, nor that one can write masterpieces with them, but they do exist, at least they seem to me to exist.

Given these antecedents, it’s very logical that a man who feels like that should have to take his subject matter, not from the Bible, nor from our heroic ballads, nor from legends, but from the events of the day, from what he sees, from what he hears, from what the newspapers say. Anyone who reads my books and is aware of Spanish life at the present time will notice that almost all the important events of the past fifteen or twenty years appear in my novels.

This gives them a character of something political of the moment, so far distant from the solemn air of serious works of literature. Deep down, I am an impressionist.

The Wandering Lady is inspired by the attempted assassination of the king and queen of Spain on the Calle Mayor.¹⁴ This attack produced a tremendous sensation. It made a great impression on me because I knew a number of those who took part in it.

Mateo Morral,¹⁵ the perpetrator of the assassination attempt, used to go to a café on the Calle de Alcalá, where we writers used to get together. He was usually accompanied by a journalist, a streetcar employee, named Ibarra, who was later imprisoned for the crime, and a Pole, who was a traveling salesman for a pharmaceutical product.¹⁶

I recall that this Pole and Ibarra had a serious altercation one night with a painter who said that anarchists were not true to their calling once they had five duros.

I don’t think I ever spoke to Morral. The man was somber and silent; he formed part of a circle of listeners who, even years ago, had tables in the cafés where literary people were conversing.

The character of Nilo Brull, who appears in The Wandering Lady, is not the counterpart of Morral, with whom I had no contact; this Brull is like a synthesis of the anarchists who came from Barcelona to Madrid after the trial in Montjuich,¹⁷ and who had a character somewhat similar to his, presumptuous, rebellious and bitter.

After the attempted assassination was committed, and Morral was found dead near Torrejón de Ardoz,¹⁸.I tried to go to the Hospital del Buen Suceso to see his corpse, but they didn’t let me go in.

On the other hand, my brother Ricardo did get in and made an etching of the anarchist in the crypt at Buen Suceso.

My brother had approached a military doctor who was on guard checking the passes, and he saw him reading a novel of mine, also about anarchists, Red Dawn.¹⁹ The two spoke and the doctor accompanied my brother to see Mateo Morral dead.

Doctor Aracil’s anguish as he walked through the streets of Madrid is inspired in my novel by what the terrorist’s acquaintances felt as they went around seeking somewhere to hide that night.

As for the rest of the book, almost everything is written based on reality. The majority of the characters are also real. Doctor Aracil,is still alive, though he is disguised by me; the one who served me as a model to depict Iturrioz is dead;²⁰ María Aracil still strolls along the Calle de Alcalá in the morning. There are some who assumed, I don’t know why, that I had wanted to depict Soledad Villafranca,²¹ Ferrer’s girlfriend²² in María Aracil, which is absurd and hasn’t a shred of truth to it.

When I wrote The Wandering Lady, I didn’t even know Soledad Villafranca; I met her afterward in Paris, at a professor’s house, where she was invited to dinner. Since she is from Pamplona and I was also raised there,²³ we spoke for quite a while, and in the course of the conversation, she told me that she had read The Wandering Lady. As is logical, she hadn’t found any allusion to herself in the book, and, on the other hand, she thought she had seen the counterpart of Ferrer.

The other characters in the novel are also taken from reality, and my brother and I and a friend made the trip through La Vera de Plasencia, with a donkey carrying our provisions and a camping tent.

The small run-down inns and paradors along the road are more or less like those described by me, with the same names and the same class of people. El Musiú, El Ninchi and El Grillo may still be possibly wandering around through those villages, pursuing their life of road trotting and swindling fools.

A book like The Wandering Lady probably does have the characteristics needed to live a long time; it isn’t a painting with pretensions for a museum, but rather an impressionistic canvas; as a work, it is perhaps too rough, too harsh, lacking serenity….

This ephemeral character of my work does not cause me displeasure. We are men of the present day, people enamored of the moment that is passing, of what is fleeting, of what is transitory, and the lasting nature of our work concerns us very little, so little, that it hardly concerns us at all.

PÍO BAROJA

Madrid, March, 1914

I

GRANDMA

In our time and in our country it is very difficult to be a child. Life fades away quickly, if it hasn’t already sprung forth withered by heredity. The majority of men and women have never lived through a childhood. It’s also true that almost nobody succeeds in living through a youth. A father, a mother, a servant, a teacher, a governess, a policeman, all conspire against infancy; just as business, money, social position, political vanity, the desire to seek public office conspire against youth.

In Spain, and in our times of industrialization, of luxury, of laxity, in order to be in real harmony with your environment, you have to be old from the cradle on, and to console yourself a little, you have to say from time to time, It is necessary to be young, you have to laugh, you have to live. But nobody laughs and nobody lives.

And Spain today is the ideal country for the decrepit, for those who have returned home rich from South America, for those who’ve failed, for all those who have nothing left to do in life, because they’ve already done it, or because their sole purpose is to go on vegetating.

María Aracil enjoyed the good fortune of spending the first years of her existence somewhat abandoned, and thanks to that abandonment, she was able to have the ideas of a child and the life of a child till she was fourteen or fifteen years old. Because she was an orphan without a mother, she felt a great affection for her father, Doctor Aracil; but the doctor wasn’t able or didn’t know how to attend to his daughter, and her grandmother was the one in