Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Besides his miniature magnifying glass and telescope, Huxley had a pair of queer black plastic spectacles, with innumerable fine holes, like sieves, where the lenses would normally be. These, he told us, were an ancient invention of the Chinese, useful for both near-sighted and far-sighted eyes. Laura remarked that she also found them very useful for going to sleep, and when we finally got on the plane she put them on and promptly did so. The rest of us snoozed, too, drank tepid water, and finished up the curling sandwiches; we all seemed a little depleted and remote. We tried to settle down to “Grey Eminence,” “The Eclipse of God,” and “Lah-dee,” but without much success. I remember discussing “The Mill on the Floss” in a dream-like way, and then having a conversation with Huxley about Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, or rather, his reminiscing about them, gently as always. He then spoke about Utopia, the subject of his next novel. His is set on an island, I think in the Indian Ocean, in a mingling of the best of both eastern and western cultures. It is a society “where men are able to realize their potentialities as they have never been able to in any past or present civilization.” It seemed quite natural to be hearing about it five thousand feet up in the air, deserting one of the most primitive societies left on earth, rushing towards still another attempt at “the most modern city in the world.”

Shortly after dark we were home, home to Brasília, that is. Our Microbus failed to meet us and we were driven back to the hotel in a brand new bright yellow truck, with benches in back. It was suddenly very cold; the Southern Cross was brilliant; the driver got lost and we wound up back at the Palace of the Dawn again.

* * *

Clean, quiet, asking each other for Cafiaspirinas, some with freshly shampooed damp heads, we assembled for another late dinner, while the canned music struck up especially for us. The table wobbled — they all did — and the elderly Italian waiter rushed up to put a wad of paper under a leg, exclaiming disgustedly “Tutti moderni! Tutti moderni!” then talked feelingly in Italian with the Huxleys on this subject.

During dinner Callado told us, in his pleasant way and beautiful English, more about the Indian Service and the three Villas Boas brothers. From a middle class São Paulo family, with only elementary educations and very much against their parents’ wishes, all three grew up with the same passion for the Indians and have given their lives to them. The Indians seem to inspire a deep affection in almost anyone who has to work with them; we had all noticed how gentle and friendly the Air Force men had been. Or, it may be partly due to the childlike charm of the Indians themselves and partly almost to the old Portuguese colonising gift; they were (and are) almost completely without racial or color prejudices and treated whatever strange races they ran across with the same amused, affectionate familiarity that they had for each other. Callado also spoke of the founder of the Indian Service, the famous part-Indian General Rondon (who as Captain Rondon, once took Theodore Roosevelt hunting in Brasil); he had died a few months before. Huxley was very much taken with Rondon’s motto for the Service: “Let yourself be killed if necessary, but never kill.”

The next morning we left bright and early again for the cluttered little airport. Three society women from São Paulo, left over from the President’s party, were there, telling each other ecstatically how much they liked Brasília. The Huxleys were leaving first, for São Paulo; the rest of us were returning by another plane to Rio. Some of us were carrying the slightly funereal black bags presented by the hotel. The Huxleys had one, and several air-line bags as well, and Huxley said that that was really the way contemporary man should travel, just a collection of such bags on a string over his shoulder. The head of the Cultural Division of Itamarati was doing his best to draw some final, enlightening, summarizing statement about Brasília from Huxley before he left, but he was not having much luck. Huxley would only commit himself to saying that he’d like to come back in ten years’ time. I felt, however, that in ten years or in twenty, it would be all the same: Brasília, the Uialapiti, the continent of South America itself, would be being viewed sub specie aeternitatis.

* * *

A day or so later, in his newspaper the Correio da Manha, Antônio Callado printed an account of the trip called “A Sage among the Savages.” Of Brasília he said parenthetically: “It is a city of consumers, set down in a desert where not even a cabbage plant can be seen. For a long time to come, its red dust will absorb, like blotting paper, the energies of the country … Doesn’t a city begin with railroads and agriculture? Brasília is living like Berlin at the time of the Russian invasion. On one hand there are palaces, on the other the slums of the Free City; on one Old Fashioneds in the hotel bar, on the other cachaça in the real ‘saloons’ of that fantastic slum. One notices there a Teutonic preoccupation with problems that have not yet arisen. For example: the airport is miles from everything in order to prevent future congestion, when there could easily be a temporary airport near the hotel…”

Another English author, more outspoken than Huxley, wrote: “I have a strong idea that no man can ordain that on such a spot shall be built a great and thriving city. No man can so ordain even though he leave behind him … a prestige sufficient to bind his successors to his wishes.

“There is much desolate land within the country, but I think that none is so desolate in its state of nature as three-fourths of the ground on which is supposed to stand the city.… There is a map accurately laid down, and taking that map with him on his journeys a man may lose himself in the streets … as one does in the deserts of the Holy Land. In the first place, no one knows where the places are, or is sure of their existence, and then between their presumed localities the land is wild, trackless, unbridged, uninhabited, and desolate.

“For myself, I do not believe in cities made after this fashion. Commerce, I think, must elect the site of all large congregations of mankind. In some mysterious way she ascertains what she wants, and having acquired that, draws men in thousands around her properties.”

Those are a few of Anthony Trollope’s gentler comments on the city of Washington in 1861. The United States of the nineteenth century and the Brasil of the twentieth are not, perhaps, really very comparable; however, Trollope, and his mother, and all the many other prophets of failure were wrong about Washington, and it behooves Americans to be particularly careful in predictions about Brasília. But the tone of Callado’s remarks seems to echo the feelings of all intelligent Brasilians I know on the subject. Rather desperately and resignedly, they are hoping for the best. Perhaps we should also all spare a little hope for the Indians.

1958

Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages. Made by Walter de la Mare (Knopf; $7.50).

Although much of the poetry I happen to admire is not to be found in it, I still think this is the best anthology I know of. First published in 1923, it waited for thirty-four years to be reissued in this new edition, prepared by Walter de la Mare shortly before his death. There are now 483 poems (besides many more in the notes) and the notes have been expanded from 171 to 294 pages. It is a marvellous book for children, but not at all a “children’s book”; de la Mare maintains a little of his air of mystery even as to whom his readers are to be. It looks like a nice old-fashioned book: big and solid, opaque paper and large type, unlike those scholarly or contemporary anthologies with thin pages that stick together, pairs of dates after every poem, and meager biographical notes in fine, fine type. Auden has said that he learned more from it “than I have from most books of overt criticism.” I don’t believe in forcing poetry on anyone, even a child, but if one knows a child at all interested in the subject, this is the perfect birthday book. One can’t expect a little Auden every time, but at least, as he also said about the possible effects on children of reading de la Mare’s own verse, “he will not have a tin ear.” It is a fine book to memorize from; and I think that the custom of having children recite to company rather than entertain them with discourse is one that could be revived for the benefit and pleasure of all.