The Lord of Labraz: final thoughts

The Lord of Labraz by Pío Baroja, translated by Aubrey F. G. Bell, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926 (originally released in 1903 in Spanish)

I mentioned in an earlier post that decay was a central theme in this book. Labraz, an imaginary town set in the Cantabria region of Spain, fought progress tooth and nail and won (?) the battle. They shunned a railroad line allowing a nearby city, originally poorer than Labraz, to grow and prosper. “Labraz was a terrible town, a town of the Middle Ages. It had not a single level street, and the houses all had stone escutcheons. Nearly all of them were austere and silent; many were almost or completely in ruins.” The abbot spoke for much of the town when commenting on degeneration and the progressive young men pushing for regeneration:

”It is the revolutionary spirit,” he said. “Who is to blame that these young men will be the ruin of Spain? Their parents, their elders, all those who teach them to forget the practice of religion. So the Liberal spirit spreads like a weed; it penetrates into distant corners; and those madmen do not see it, those madmen do not perceive that the Church is threatened and society in danger.”

The irony drips from Baroja’s pen since he makes it clear that the Church and society are already corrupt and not worth saving, at least as represented by the abbot. Baroja’s Spain (in the few books I’ve read) has plenty of good and industrious people but misery and exploitation continually weigh them down. Much of the time characters simply struggle for life in a world caught between clashing principles. No wonder the English Mr. Bothwell loved Labraz enough to settle in it. In answer to a young idealist’s question as to whether or not they should search for the truth, Mr. Bothwell replies in the negative, wishing to stay happy in his agreeable dream, even if it’s an illusion:

”No, because if we found it, we should not know whether it were absolute or not; for me there are only agreeable truths and disagreeable truths: the agreeable truths we must always accept, the disagreeable ones we must reject. I cannot paint, it is true, but I have the illusion that I can, and so I live. Why should I convince myself that I cannot paint?”

“You wish, then,” answered Bengoa, “that we should sleep wrapped in our illusions as in a continual dream.”

“Exactly, but an agreeable dream.”

The blind nobleman at the center of the story suffers more than his share of tribulation but never completely sinks beneath the weight. He proves to be resilient, possessing a strength that occasionally reveals its full power. Ah, but it’s all supposedly a tale from the mind of Mr. Bothwell we’re reading. The narrator from the preface has seen the blind nobleman around town so he never renounced Labraz, nor did he leave for a trek across the heart of Spain. So have we been had or is Baroja using irony and paradox in the story to make a point? I’m not sure since he may be trying to have it both ways, which is fine by me. As I’ve said in previous posts the book feels a little frivolous and frothy at times but I enjoyed it.

My earlier posts on the book can be found at these links:

Baptizing the wine

Leaving no stone unturned

He was a stomach rather than a man

The Lord of Labraz: he was a stomach rather than a man

The Lord of Labraz by Pío Baroja, translated by Aubrey F. G. Bell, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926 (originally released in 1903 in Spanish)

Labraz is a much simpler story than his Struggle for Life trilogy but that doesn’t make it less pleasurable to read. Structured (so far) like a romance, it’s fun to watch him work on techniques that I saw more polished in the trilogy. For example, Baroja loves to “introduce” a character without providing much information about them, letting the reader fill in the gaps or guess as to the character’s context with the rest of the story. Eventually he gets around to revealing how the character fits into the story, which the reader has probably guessed by that point. In later books this technique appears effortless while in Labraz it stands out (although to some extent maybe it had to given the romance nature of the book).

Themes from the trilogy also show up here, such as the general decay of society and the struggles of the underclasses. His feelings toward much of religion aren’t hidden or softened as this extended quote makes clear:

All had a certain air of mourning to suit the occasion: only the abbot who presided, without considering whether it was a wedding or a funeral feast, set the bad example of devouring with a barbarous voracity and without even listening to the conversation. The lord abbot, president of the collegiate church of Labraz, deserves to be described. He was a stomach rather than a man; he was now all stomach. His father had been coachman to a marquis, and his mother was the marquesa’s maid.

The coachman and his wife had intended their son for the priesthood, although his real vocation was the art of digestion. The following answer he gave as a boy proves his capacity in this respect: “What would you like to be?” he was asked.

“I? A pig.”

“Why?”

“In order to eat my hands.”

This Napoleon of digestion became a priest; owing to the influence of the marquis he became a canon, and as he was out of pace among men of higher culture they sent him to Labraz and made him abbot of the collegiate church there. He was a man of scarecely any culture at all, rather coarse, rather disgusting and extremely dirty. Don Diego de Beamonte used to relate how once in the Botanical Gardens at Madrid he had met a young man of exceptional talent called Miguel de los Santos Alvarez. They were walking up and down talking and looking at the scientific names of the trees and plants on the white labels, when a priest chanced to pass; his expression was dense, his cassock unbrushed and his hat greasy. Miguel de los Santos pointed him out to Don Diego, and if his cassock had a label attached to it like the plants and trees, said:”Clericus catolicus hispanicus.” Of this species of clericus the abbot was a magnificent specimen, but as the species comprises many types it should be said that he belonged to the manducatorius or digestivus class. He seemed to be determined to be perpetually dirty. His mantles and cassocks were a kind of atlas, in which the islands straightway became archipelagos and the archipelagos continents; his hat, of huge size, seemed rather than silk over felt to be grime over grease; not the shard with which Job scraped his flesh could have been dirtier; but he had a biretta which far outshone even his hat in this respect. The abbot was of enormous size, with protruding belly, thin legs, large strong hands, while his huge feet, flat and deformed, issued from beneath his cassock like two boats. His eyes, dull beneath the half-closed lids, were on the surface of the flesh, as though they were sewn on to it; his nose was long, thick and rubicund, his face was narrow, his jaw prominent, and his large yellow teeth resembled those of an old horse. The good priest had a mortal hatred of water; he shaved very occasionally and never washed, so as not to waste his time. Although his brain was deranged by the nitrogen of his rich food and his head was as empty as his stomach was full, he had a certain success as a preacher. His oratory was on a level with the meanest intelligence and could be heard by the deafest ear, for if he did not possess the brain of a St. Augustine or of an Origen he had a throat which might vie with all the Fathers of the Church. He would spend three or four hours shouting and vociferating, for the most part of the time crying out insults against the Liberals and Freemasons. His style was the most picturesque and absurd that one could imagine. He cultivated the burlesque manner with eminent success, and sometimes his strange remarks would cause shouts of laughter among the congregation. He was fond of comparing Espatero with God, only to draw the moral that he was not worthy so much as to unloose his shoe-latchet.

The Lord of Labraz: leaving no stone unturned

The Lord of Labraz by Pío Baroja, translated by Aubrey F. G. Bell, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926 (originally released in 1903 in Spanish)

From TIME.com’s August 30, 1926 book reviews:

The Spanish hail Señor Baroja as their most popular living talespinner. He writes a little like Dickens, a little like Stevenson, always like a Spaniard—that is, with bold light, harsh shading. His story here is quite simple—a blind nobleman in a priest-ridden hill town quixotically shoulders his brother's misdeeds, earning only calumny and spite from the populace, renouncing society and going to wander, Lear-like, over the bleak table-lands with a wronged barmaid for his Cordelia, a Basque beggar for Poor Tom. It is fiction with strong bones.

Today we have an even better shorthand available for the this book, which would be to imagine Shakespeare and Dickens combining to write telenovelas.

Baroja can be deft in his descriptions—all you need to know about the “priest-ridden” description can be supported in one sentence:

This church was endowed with forty-eight benefices, but as the salaries were very small, those favoured were naturally men of limited education; according to the chronicler Alizaga, they were simple modest persons who spent their time gambling and drinking, courting and coursing.

There are many more episodes that help describe the town, such as the madam of a brothel threatening to post a list of the priests that visit her house. The town seems to attract its share of eccentric or flawed characters that blend in with the locals. An exiled roué returns to Labraz and picks up right where the reader imagines he left off. The Englishman Samuel Bothwell Crawford, whose novel we are supposedly reading here, absurdly (but effectively) defends the honor of his innkeeper’s daughters. Life in Labraz…well, let’s see another example:

A single occurrence paints the town. Once during Holy Week, while the procession was going through the streets, a strolling gipsy with a monkey arrived and begged for alms. He avoided the streets through which the procession passed, and made the monkey dance to the sound of a drum. Suddenly the sky became overcast and presently it began to rain. The people, those who were returning in the robes with which they had played a part in the procession, those who had carried the canopy, the standards and the image on its platform, were of opinion that the gipsy’s ape was responsible for the rain. A canon, with the face of a pig, sad that for the gipsy to have gone about the streets on that day was in very truth an insult to the Divine Majesty, and forthwith all those bullies of the procession hurled themselves on the monkey and stabbed it all over. The gipsy ran away and was pursued with stones till he was lost to sight. All these things Perico, the Liberal of the town, explained by the following poem, which he had probably invented:

In Labraz you must not expect
Many Liberals to collect,
Labraz where nine of ten at least
Are sons of canon, monk or priest.

While the story continues to be established Baroja weaves in more literature:

One day Micaela, turning over and sorting things in the upper rooms, found in a closed case, wrapped up in cloths, a patined harp lavishly adorned. In the same box were some books yellow with time; there were French novels, Matilde, and Sir Walter Scott’s Rokeby and The lady of the Lake, Lamartine’s Graziellta, and other novels; the rest were devotional works with images and certificates of confession in their pages. Micaela had the harp brought down to her room, and read the novels. Despite her natural calm and aristocratic coldness, all that mass of languid love affairs and tender complaints made an impression o her, and her mind fell a pretty to the poison of romanticism.

The young man hired to teach Micaela how to play the harp, Raimundo, falls hopelessly in love with her. As the nephew of the organist of the church and himself the back-up organist, his timidity and respect, not to mention his vows, lead him to remain quiet of his desire although he tries (and succeeds) in expressing himself through playing the organ.

The visiting roué, Ramiro, focuses his skill to seduce Micaela. “Don Ramiro left no stone unturned: he lent her Faublas and the Liasons Dangereuses in hopes that they might influence her; but Micaela read these books and returned them with the comment that she had found them dull and silly.” Subtle, isn't he? I’m sure we’ll find out if the effort pays off or not in the next book titled “The Sacrilege.”

The Lord of Labraz: baptizing the wine

The Lord of Labraz by Pío Baroja, translated by Aubrey F. G. Bell, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926 (originally released in 1903 in Spanish)

I’ve discovered Pío Baroja recently and have enjoyed what I’ve read. To say he’s inconsistent in many areas would be an understatement but part of his writing has appealed to me. So until I find The Tree of Knowledge in translation for less than several hundred dollars I’ll be content to read his other (I hate to say lesser) works. Hopefully I can capture some of the better aspects of this book with a few extended quotes for anyone interested in Baroja.

In the preface of The Lord of Labraz, a nameless narrator meets an Englishman in Labraz, “a terrible town, a town of the Middle Ages”. The Englishman, Samuel Bothwell Crawford, tells of his enjoyments and preferences:

”And now, as Swiveller says, let us drink the rosy wine of friendship and sing the old melody “Begone, dull care.’”

I remembered that this Swiveller is a character in Dickens, in The Old Curiosity Shop, and I asked the Englishman if he did not consider the author of Pickwick an admirable novelist.

“Yes,” he answered, very seriously, “he was a good fellow. Let us drink his health.”

“The health of one who no longer exists?” I inquired.

“Does he not exist in his books far more than the majority of living persons, more than so many an insignificant wight?”

So we drank Dickens’ health in the rosy wine of friendship.

The narrator takes a copy of a novel that Bothwell Crawford has written, copying it unchanged for us to read…which makes up the novel that follows.

At the inn of Goya in Labraz, we’re introduced to a former worker at the inn who married the owner’s daughter:

Ten years after his marriage Domingo Chiqui died, possibly from having lived too well, and left the Goya with two daughters. There was no memory in the town of an illness and death so gay as those of the hostess’ husband. His friends would go to visit him in the room where he lay in bed, and his illness seemed to have sharpened his wits and added to his facetiousness, for at every instant he made some witty remark in his intricate language, so that laughter filled his bedroom instead of lamentation and where one would have expected sad long faces were only cheerful looks and gleaming merry eyes. In his last moments his wit made even the priest who had gone to confess him laugh; he consoled his friends with a grotesque account of the road of purgatory he would have to tread and how he would tell St. Peter that, although a tavernkeeper, he had not often baptized his wine.

Literature seems to play an enhanced role in the book, not just in allusions but with characters in it as well:

The Goya [the hostess of the Goya Inn] raised her head and, pointing with her finger to the greasy book that she was reading, exclaimed, as though she were speaking to someone who was not present:

“This scene fills me with greater enthusiasm each time I read it. The Duke Rodolfo is about to enter the room of the dressmaker. I think he is her lover; yes, he must be her lover, I have no doubt of it.”

The muleteer seated in the dark, bent forward towards the old man and said: “I say, Preacher, perhaps the book reminds her of some of her own past, eh?”

The old man whom the muleteer had addressed as Preacher exclaimed in a fine bass voice: “What a brute he is! Yet the wretch speaks sooth!” The Goya, who had half heard the muleteer’s remark, asked dryly: “What did he say?”

Blanca, who had also understood their allusions, murmured, looking severely at the Goya: “I don’t know why you read these novels, Mother: they are nothing but lies.”

“Lies? Yes, a strange kind of lies.”

While Baroja can be sublime, he can also be sloppy. Bothwell Crawford leaves the inn at one point, magically reappearing unannounced just a few lines later. Another feature I’ve enjoyed with Baroja lies in his development of supporting characters, such as the Captain of the Keys:

The Captain watched the arrival of the late-comers, and would say in the kindly tone of one set in authority: “Come along; it is time to close.” He then shut the smaller door, and after that a palisaded double-winged door facing the town; he then went up a staircase to a wooden balcony ensconced in the recess of the gate, above a large crucifix. That was where the Captain of the Keys lived. Often in the middle of the night he would have to get up, much against his well, to open for some townsman or for the doctor. The Captain of the Keys was a very important personage in the house of the Goya. According to his own account he represented for the whole town the family and the tranquility of the home. In his hands was the key in which securely rested the whole life of the town. The Captain could never understand, and one can well believe it, that there should be towns mad and imprudent enough to pull down their walls. This seemed to him the greatest absurdity.

Sloppy or not, Baroja makes it enjoyable…