Baroja's Madrid in the Poems of "Winter In Castile" by John Dos Passos

BAROJA'S MADRID IN THE POEMS OF "WINTER IN CASTILE BY JOHN DOS PASSOS // Nancy Bredendick has taught in die English Department of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid since 1991. Before diat she was Professor of Spanish atMankato State University in Minnesota. Interested in the connections between Spanish and North American writing she is the author of articUs on the poetry of Lorca in the songs of George Henry Crumb, and on the meaning ofTotos célebres in Hemingway 's Death in the Afternoon. Images of turn-of-the-century Madrid are scarce in North American letters. One place they can be found is in A Pushcart at the Curb (1922), a little known book of poems by the North American novelist John Dos Passos (1896-1970). The poems about Madrid (thirteen cityscapes or street scenes) belong to a section of the book called "Winter in Castile." They were written during a four month period in 1916-1917 when Dos Passos, a year out of Harvard and just turning twenty-one, came to the city to study architecture and lived in the "Pensión Boston" near the Puerta del Sol.1 One of the literary versions of Madrid discovered that wintet by Dos Passos, who was a voracious reader, was Baroja's trilogy "La lucha por la vida." Several years later, on the occasion of the publication of the English translation of MaU hierba, an older Dos Passos recalls carrying Baroja's novels around with him as he explored the streets of the city in 1916, finding Baroja's trilogy a true and authentic guide: [Rjoaming through the dattering streets of Madrid with "Weeds" in one pocket and M.Garnier's dictionary in another, you seemed to have the keys to every alley and wineshop, to the iron-bound doors that opened on the breakneck stairs, with their invariable smell of scorched olive-oil, of all the tenement houses, to every courtyard and rag market. These books led you through all the back lots and Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 3, 1999 152 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies bad lands and cabbage patches that filled the valleys round the city.... They were the tiue Baedeket to that seething mass of rebellious, unkempt, louse-bitten, soaring life that was Madrid... ("Building Lots" 73 ) Alerted to a connection between the two writers by a number of statements like this one,2 scholars have written articles pointing out half a dozen resemblances between Baroja and Dos Passos as novelists and social critics. Among the resemblances found: their penchant for the picaresque (Fichtelberg), their hatred of authority, their pessimism, their hard-toclassify radical views, their sensitivity to pain, their contradictory romantic/realist sensibilities, their sense of alienation from society (Borenstein; Vázquez-Bigi; Golson ). With so many resemblances identified , it stands to reason that as writers on the subject of Madrid there are similarities as well. And there are. As far as I know no one has examined them in detail, but one can find a number of similarities dealing with how Baroja's and Dos Passos's images of Madrid are made: both use natural -sounding language and concrete images ; both use simple rhythms of repetition and refrain; both choose poverty, death, and loneliness as prominent themes; both focus on unfashionable quarters of the city and on its least respectable inhabitants; and finally, both choose an observer's stance—with the difference that Dos Passos's presence is generally less noticeable than Baroja's. Drawing on some of the similarities just mentioned, I will examine three elements of Baroja's Madrid that are found in Dos Passos's Madrid—three ways Madrid is seen in early works by Baroja and in the poems of "Winter in Castile": 1) Madrid is a city of "tono menor," a city to be sung about in low key; 2) Madrid is a city of disturbing contrasts between the privileged and the unfortunate; 3) Madrid is a city for the solitary romantic, a city seen from the perspective of sexual longing and frustration. The work of Baroja that lends itself most readily to comparison with the poems of "Winter in Castile" is his earliest...