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Updated: June 1, 2025
He is, one fancies, a bit disgusted and a bit despairing. But if it is despair, it is surely not the despair of one who has shirked the trial. The present book, Juventud, Egolatria, was written at the height of the late war, and there is a preface to the original edition, omitted here, in which Baroja defends his concern with aesthetic and philosophical matters at such a time.
After his attempt to assassinate the King and Queen in the Calle Mayor on their return from the Royal wedding ceremony, Baroja went to view Morral's body, but was refused admittance. A drawing of Morral was made at the time, however, by Ricardo Baroja. In this connection, Jose Nakens, to whom the author pays his compliments on an earlier page, was subjected to an unusual experience.
Pio Baroja is a product of the intellectual reign of terror that went on in Spain after the catastrophe of 1898. That catastrophe, of course, was anything but unforeseen. The national literature, for a good many years before the event, had been made dismal by the croaking of Iokanaans, and there was a definite defaitiste party among the intelligentsia.
The decadent novel, foreshadowed a few years since by Alejandro Sawa, has attained full maturity in Hoyos y Vinent, while the distinctive growth of the century is the novel of ideas, exact, penetrating, persistently suggestive in the larger sense, which does not hesitate to make demands upon the reader, and this is exemplified most distinctively, both temperamentally and intellectually, by Pio Baroja.
Baroja, though his career has not been as dramatic as Blasco's, has at all events taken a hand in the life of his time and country and served his day in the trenches of the new enlightenment. He is anything but a theorist. But there is surely no little significance in his final retreat to his Basque hillside, there to seek peace above the turmoil.
I prefer flour in the shape of bread with my dinner, but cloth will go further with a man who desires to appear well in public. When I was serving upon the Town Council, an anonymous publication entitled "Masks Off," printed the following among other gems: "Pio Baroja is a man of letters who runs a bake-shop."
This same hidalgo, Juan Martinez de Baroja, moved the enforcement of this decree, as is affirmed by a writ of execution which is inscribed on forty-five leaves of parchment, to which is attached a leaden seal pendant from a cord of silk, at the end of which may be found the stipulations of the judgment entered against the Municipality and Corporation of the Town and Earldom of Trevino and the Village of Samiano.
Baroja, evading this grand enemy of all ideas, sat himself down to inspect and co-ordinate the ideas that had gradually come to growth in his mind before the bands began to bray. The result is a book that is interesting, not only as the frank talking aloud of one very unusual man, but also as a representation of what is going on in the heads of a great many other Spaniards.
I believe that I have read in Campion that the word Baroja is compounded from the Celtic bar, meaning mountain, and the Basque otza, ocha meaning cold. In short, a cold mountain. The district of Penacerrada, which includes Baroja, is an austere land, covered with intricate mountain ranges which are clad with trees and scrub live oaks. Hawks abound.
"It would be all right," answered the proprietor, who did not know me, "if anybody knew who Martinez Ruiz was; and who is this Pio Baroja?"
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