Books: In Pursuit of Life

THE RESTLESSNESS OF SHANTI ANDJA (41 5 pp.)—Plo Baroja, franslafed by Anthony Kerrigan—University of Michigan ($6.50).

Few foreign authors have been presented to U.S. readers with the kind of endorsement that appears on the dust jacket of The Restlessness of Shanti An-dia. The testimonial was delivered in person by Ernest Hemingway, as Pio Baroja, 83, lay dying in his Madrid apartment three years ago. Said Hemingway: “Allow me to pay this small tribute to you who taught so much to those of us who wanted to be writers when we were young. I deplore the fact that you have not yet received a Nobel Prize, especially when it was given to so many who deserved it less, like me, who am only an adventurer.”

Adventure & Achievement. The question of Nobelity aside, Shanti Andia makes clear its author’s standing as one of the top men of modern Spanish letters and also explains why Hemingway calls himself Baroja’s disciple. In this novel the hero, Shanti, is a Basque sea captain who tells his own story, noting: “A strange existence is mine, and that of other wanderers. During one long epoch, all is adventure, events; and then, in another, there is nothing but commentary on past events.” The combination of violent action and desperate search for the meaning of action marks every Hemingway hero, from the young American ambulance driver in World War I to the old fisherman, far out at sea, engaged in his biggest struggle. The same combination of events and commentary, held in exquisite balance, gives Shanti Andia the thrust of life itself at all its stages: the child’s wonder at his discovery of sunlight on water, the youth’s engagement in voyages, the old man’s sad reverence for what is gone.

Don Pio is one of Spain’s greatest 20th century novelists; yet many of the elements of Shanti Andia have an old-fashioned ring. The story is laid along the Basque seacoast of the igth century. There is a duel, a mutiny, piracy, the slave trade, an escape from prison, changed identities, a kidnaoing, even buried treasure. The hi?h adventure is made believable by the style—dry, direct, understated. But the excitement is only incidental to the story’s main theme, which is Shanti’s lifelong pursuit of truth and his stoic acceptance of whatever roadblocks fate may put in his path.

The truth sought by Shanti concerns the fate of an uncle, Juan de Aguirre, who like himself was a seafarer. Throughout the beautifully told story of Shanti’s growing up and taking to the sea, fragments of the uncle’s life, some contradictory, some provocative, come to his attention. Gradually, before the reader is fully aware of the change, the story has become that of Shanti’s quest for his uncle. The mystery is eventually solved by a document written by the uncle himself. But by this time, Shanti and the reader are both well beyond the simple curiosity that began the search. Shanti is back in his village and back with his childhood sense of rapture at the sun and the sea. When his share of the treasure he found is sent to him there, he casts it into the sea. He has climbed from action to contemplation, and from that height realizes that both are their own rewards.

“Generation of 1898.” The writer’s life, at once active and contemplative, had to be its own reward for Don Pio. Although he wrote nearly 100 novels, he made no more than a modest living. In part, his relative financial failure stemmed from his own profound disinterest in money matters, but there were two other forces at work—the Franco government’s ban on almost all his books, and the enduring hostility of the Spanish Catholic Church.

Included in the volume with Shanti Andia are a handful of sketches and one long drama, The Legend of Juan de Alzate, which gives an indication of what the Spanish church disliked. Baroja’s hero is one of the last pagan village aristocrats of the Basques, who devotes his life to a futile effort to keep Catholicism out of the Basque country. An old pagan priest, recently baptized, observes that the attempt is doomed: “Do you dispose of jails, gallows, bonfires, judges, hangmen and soldiers to drive the message home, like the Catholics?”

Baroja was a member of Spain’s “Generation of 1898,” whose intellectual destiny was shaped by the disastrous war with the U.S. Writers of that era engaged in an anguished national-soul searching;. At times, the probing of men like Baroja is so painful that they are denounced by established power as revolutionists. More often they are merely mourning a dead past in the traditional attitude of the conservative. Throughout Shanti Andia there is a note of longing for the old ways of the Basques and of the sea., Shanti closes his story: “Oh, gallant riggings! White, white sails! 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!”