Note: Again, TBR’d is a feature in which I idly comment on writers who’ve appeared on my radar, but who I haven’t read—inherently irresponsible, right? So I mostly just say a few words about the style and about what others, more knowledgeable than me, have said about the writer(s) in question. If later in life the writer became an axe-murderer, slave-trader, or horrible male chauvinist, it’s not my fault! I didn’t know! No, in all seriousness, these are just writers I’d like to learn more about.

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Pío Baroja y Nessi (1872 – 1956) was a Basque writer who flourished at the beginning of the 20th century, and who drew the admiration of such authors as John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, and Ernest Hemingway (who apparently made a big to-do about meeting the aged writer just so Baroja could know that Hemingway felt he deserved the Nobel prize more than himself–a very grand, Hemingway-esque gesture, but okay.)

I do notice a Mencken-like note of sarcasm in the descriptions that open Baroja’s book The Quest, one of the handful of English translations of his work available in the public domain. He appears to have been fairly prolific of trilogies (like Balzac), and his style seems smooth with controlled colors. Here’s a characteristic paragraph from The Quest:

While the landlady lulled her fancy in this sweet vision of a brothel de luxe, Petra entered a dingy little room that was cluttered with old furniture. She set the light upon the chair, and placed a greasy box of matches on the top of a container; she read for a moment out of a filthy, begrimed devotionary printed in large type; she repeated several prayers with her eyes raised to the ceiling, then began to undress. The night was stifling; in that hole the heat was horrible. Petra got into bed, crossed herself, put out the lamp, which smoked for a long time, stretched herself out and laid her head upon the pillow. A worm in one of the pieces of furniture made the wood crack at regular intervals.

This is largely considerate prose. The “filthy, begrimed” adds a note of lexical specificity, while the worm in the wood crack offers a single illuminating detail about the room. An analogue might be a less showy Edgar Saltus. Of course, Saltus never achieved widespread fame and it seems Baroja’s fame was muted as well. In the (characteristically) quick summary H.L. Mencken gives of turn of the century Spanish literature at the beginning of his edition of Baroja’s Youth and Egolatry, Mencken explains this muted response by way of a contrast with the (as he calls him) “half artist and half mob orator” Blasco Ibanez, who he paints as more of a showman than a serious artist. Baroja, on the other hand:

A novelist undoubtedly as skilful as Blasco and a good deal more profound, he lacks the quality of enthusiasm and thus makes a more restricted appeal. In place of gaudy certainty he offers disconcerting questionings; in place of a neat and well-rounded body of doctrine he puts forward a sort of generalized contra-doctrine. Baroja is the analyst, the critic, almost the cynic. If he leans toward any definite doctrine at all, it is towards the doctrine that the essential ills of man are incurable, that all the remedies proposed are as bad as the disease, that it is almost a waste of time to bother about humanity in general.

This is probably overstated and reflective of Mencken’s own cynical outlook. Another apparently commendatory assessment of Baroja’s style comes from a 1928 Virginia Quarterly Review write-up of what seems to be regarded as his best book, The Tree of Life (El arbol de la sciencia):

His task seems to be to set down impartially and almost without color exactly what he sees. One may read a dozen of his novels without gaining any idea of what he himself believes about anything. When Baroja writes about Spain, he writes as a physician would write who has to prepare a diagnostic report after examining a beloved friend: no matter what the report must be—whether it describes a normal individual soundly healthy in body and mind and spirit, or whether it describe someone ravaged by disease- -it is written out with cold and exact objectivity. In Baroja, if there are errors, they are always errors of observation. There are no exaggerations, no distortions, no heat of passion, no pity. His style is as hard and as plain as that of the best scientific treatises on astronomy or applied mathematics.

That does sound like someone Hemingway would admire.

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Free public domain books (in English) by Pío Baroja

The City of the Discreet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917. Translated by Jacob S. Fassett Jr.

Caesar or Nothing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919. Translated by Louis How.

Youth and Egolatry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920. Translated by Jacob S. Fassett Jr. and Frances L. Philips.

The Quest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922. Translated by Isaac Goldberg.