Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Castro Alves (1847–1871) was the most famous Abolitionist poet. His long dramatic poem, “THE SLAVE SHIP,” was given in a form of group-recitation last year, in Rio and São Paulo, and stood the test very successfully; even lines such as:

“Exists a people whose banner serves

To hide such infamy and cowardice!..

My God, My God, what a flag is this…?”

have recovered significance and dignity, a hundred years later.

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Brazil’s “ modernismo ” movement began with the now-famous “Week of Modern Art” in the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, in 1922. Beginning with the influence of the Dadaists and Surrealists, it, too, soon divided between the European-minded and the Indigenous-minded. There was even a small movement within it that called itself Cannibals in their desire to be native Brazilians and nothing else, and issued the “Anthropophagite Manifesto.” The name of Mário de Andrade cannot be omitted — starting as a poet of the “modernismos” he became one of the greatest forces in the Brazilian artistic renaissance. In music, folk art, poetry, and prose — almost everything in contemporary Brazilian artistic life owes a great debt to Mário de Andrade, and although he died in 1945 his name is mentioned constantly.

The two greatest personalities in Brazilian literature are prose writers, and both are fortunately available, at least in part, in English. The first, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), is the greatest writer the South American continent has produced; some critics think the greatest of both American continents, ranking him with our own Henry James. Child of a poor Negro house painter and a Portuguese woman, born in Rio on one of the morros, or hills now covered by the favelas, he worked as typographer and journalist, married a middle-class Portuguese woman, and published book after book of poems, stories, and novels. He grew famous, was highly respected and respectable, and in 1896 founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters, whose president he was until he died. He is a deeply pessimistic, sceptical, reserved writer; there is little of the Latin rhetoric and nothing of its romaticism about his style. His best works are Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (published in English under the title of The Diary of a Small Winner ), Dom Casmurro, Quincas Borba, and some of the tales. Although the period is always the late Empire, and the setting Rio de Janeiro, Machado de Assis’s world is universal and his characters are real — as Tolstoy’s St. Petersburg is universal and Natasha not just a Russian girl.

The other great prose-writer, Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909), is the author of one of the world’s strangest books, Os Sertões (published in English as Rebellion in the Backlands ). Da Cunha was a military engineer; his book is an account of a military expedition made in 1896 against a religious fanatic, Antônio Conselheiro, “The Counselor,” who had fortified himself and all his followers in the little town of Canudos, far in the interior of the State of Bahia. They managed to hold out there for a year against repeated attacks by Brazilian regiments. The book is partly accounts of futile military manoeuvres, dry reports of suffering and atrocities (which remind one of Hemingway’s famous retreat), and partly a long geographical rhapsody. The whole first half, although not a novel, does for the backlands what James Joyce’s Ulysses does for the city of Dublin. Anyone who wants to get the feel of Brazilian life and landscape at their grandiose and disparate best and worst should read Rebellion in the Backlands. It is reminiscent of one of the Brazilian churches — solidly, almost crudely planned, but covered with a profusion of rich ornamentation and extraneous life, even to the point of being repellent.

It is perfectly true that in Brazil culture and the arts are more respected than in our own industrialized and middle-class country. Perhaps this is due not so much to European tradition as Brazilians like to think, as it is to the fact that, as in government, Brazil is one big family. In spite of examples of the democracy of the arts, — Aleijadinho, Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade, and Portinari — most writers and artists come from the small educated, inter-related upper-class; in various degrees they are all cousins, and a mutual admiration society is apt to result. As in government, feuds become family quarrels; first names are used — even in serious critical articles; everything is taken too personally, and the atmosphere is curiously “feminine.”

Although in this way they are spared the abrupt and cruel fluctuations of reputation that our artists suffer from, they nevertheless pay for the lack of serious criticism and competition. One sometimes feels that a 20th-century Brazilian Samuel Johnson, with all his dogmatism, might do wonders for Brazilian arts, — but maybe that is as bad as saying that Latin American countries need dictators.

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There are two sayings, Anglo-Saxon and Brazilian, that sound a little alike but have very different meanings. They illustrate very well our different points of view on the career of the artist. We say, puritanically: “He has made his bed and must lie in it.” Brazilians say, soothingly: Cria fama e deita-te na cama. “Create a reputation and stay in bed.” Too many genuine talents seem to take to their beds too early, — or to their hammocks. (A favorite way for Brazilian writers to have their pictures taken is pleasantly supine, in a fringed hammock.)

There is one anecdote Brazilians never tire of telling to illustrate their attitude towards race-relations. When some of the ladies at Pedro II’s court refused to dance with the famous Negro engineer André Rebouças, Princess Isabel herself crossed the room and asked him to dance with her. It is a nice story, and true; and it is also true that Pedro II employed several Negroes and mulattoes in high positions and that the devoted Rebouças followed him into exile and eventually died in poverty. Unfortunately this story does not necessarily prove racial tolerance; Princess Isabel was a true princess and had been well brought-up, — bem educada, as they say.

There is a better story. In 1950 Katherine Dunham was turned away from one of the big hotels in São Paulo with the excuse that there were no vacant rooms. Overnight this became a national scandal, and within days a law was passed against any discrimination whatsoever in the future. The fact that such a law had never even been thought of up until then tells almost all one needs to know about Brazil’s attitude towards the Negro. (The hotel was supposed to have acted as it did out of deference to the prejudices of its North American clientele.)

Brazilians are proud of their fine record in race-relations. Rather, their attitude can be best described by saying that the upper-class Brazilian is usually proud of his racial tolerance, while the lower-class Brazilian is not aware of his; he just practises it. The occasional anti-Negro, or racista (and this applies equally well to the occasional anti-semite), usually proves to be one of two types: the unthinking member of “society” who has got into anti-Negro or anti-Jewish “society” in his travels, and has lost his native Brazilian tolerance, or sadder still — the European emigrant who comes to Brazil having suffered in his own country because of his race or poverty, and (probably unaccustomed to Negroes, anyway) despises and is rude to them.

The old upper-class looks down on the new middle-class, because of its vulgarity or bad manners, much more than on the Negroes or mulattoes. Part of this is nostalgia for the days when there was no middle-class, part economic pressure, and part old-fashioned snobbishness. One often feels sorry for the small but growing middle-class; surely old-fashioned Brazil should have more patience with it. The still-simple class-divisions and types seem 19th century, — almost Dickensian, if a writer so remote from everything Brazilian can be mentioned in connection with Brazil.