AZORIN IMPAVID

In my adolescence we read Azorín, Baroja, Cela. Maeztu, Machado and the entire pleiad of '98 but especially Antonio Martinez who would become Azorín. His tired and concise prose enjoyed the preferences of the preceptists of Rhetoric. I remember those articles by the teacher copied in cyclostil that Father Penagos distributed for analysis. Penagos detested Unamuno, whom he called “a monkey” for having messed with the Jesuits. The good father was unaware that Azorín, whom he admired in his youth, proclaimed direct action against the clergy and said that those of the Company of Jesus had to be burned. The anarchist Martinez Ruiz boasted of not having a wife because he did not believe in private property. Following the teachings of the anarchists Krapinski and Foure Maeztu, during the revolutionary times he launched insults against the clergy. Later they changed their jacket or evolved, something very Spanish. If a Spaniard wants to stay on course, he must know which way the winds blow, some at centerboards and others at bowlines. The crisis of '98 with the loss of Cuba, the last flourishing of the empire, brought with it a wave of pessimism. Ganivet commits suicide in Riga. Others move forward with a revolutionary torch in hand. Everything had to be changed, a new order established. Like now? Having seen what we have seen and contemplating the excesses of Sanchez's gynoecium, Napias is going to go all out with Pichimont, a pro-independence Catalan has the keys to the State, the thing has a couple of perendengues 'but hey, let's continue with Azorín and the heroes of that generation 98. They were all onanists. They played mental tricks and transmitted their pessimism to those of the generation of '68. Azorín at the end of his career took over as Franco and wrote for ABC's third. Maeztu, that big Basque with difficult prose in Spanish because he was half English, wrote Defensa de la Hispanidad. When I was an official at the Newspaper Archive, I read Ramiro de Maeztu's indendiarios that said that Azorín was a climber with the manners of a Jesuit, a dry spirit marked by ambition and caution. He gets a position in the editorial office of the country's newspaper through connections and influences. He writes novels that are not real, they are bookish novels that do not copy reality or nature. In his staccato and severe style the breath of tenderness is missing. He is a standard bearer of calculation in the Jesuit way. In Azorín, books replace life by interposition or supplantation. In short, Maeztu gives the Monovar writer a good spanking in this article published in Imparcial. Of course, the task of creation that is done within four walls is arduous and difficult. He sits down and feels in the midst of his anger, which may be a divine quid or a monomania. Win to change the world by messing with the Jews but novels can't change the world. Art is a vicious circle that closes in on itself. Azorin writes surrounded by books. He shows a certain syngenesis for Montaigne whom he constantly quotes. He is a prisoner of the dead letter, Azorin recreates the classics, revives them. Are books your salvation or your ruin? He walks away, enclosed within the four walls of his ivory tower, from the Spanish brutality of his excessiveness, but his characters misfire. For to live is to see return, to caress the myth of eternal return. In his work Los Pueblos he announces the arrival of empty Spain. Pio Baroja's pessimism is of a different kind. He is not intellectual but vital, he comes from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He studied Medicine but after attending a birth in Cestona, seeing the feces and blood that surrounds the placentas in which human beings come into the world, he abandoned his degree, almost fainted from disgust, came to Madrid and put a bakery, which failed. He lived poorly and even though his books The House of the Aizgorris had circulations of three thousand copies, of which five hundred were sold, a luxury at that time the bestseller season had not been opened. Misogynist Don Pío said that women go with the one who shows more muscle and has a good wallet. In his works that do not follow a defined plot line, the characters come and go and the author does not remember them again, he exudes skepticism. Getting away and contemplating beings from afar is a good idea for walking the path. Baroja remained a bachelor his entire life and is the most chaste and least lascivious of the Spanish novelists. Perhaps he read that palinody launched by Quevedo against the female sex: “women are forced company that must be kept with modesty, that must be enjoyed with love and communicated with suspicion. If treated well, some are bad. If they are treated badly they are worse. He who uses his caresses and does not trust them is very warned because there is Doña Napias, the Galician meiga, the empowered and arrogant of the Sánchez gynecologist to validate such a statement. To live is to suffer and