Prose (41 page)

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Until the present century there is not much to be said about painting in Brazil. Mauritzstad had its Frans Post, who did fresh and still familiar-looking landscapes while in Brazil, then spent long years in Europe painting imitations of them. With the French Comissions the illustrators of
genre
scenes began to arrive: Debret, Rugendas, Ribeirolles, later Ender, who have given us volumes of fascinating detailed studies of slaves, costumes, street scenes, and buildings of the 19th century. Some of the church-painting that has survived is a fairly high quality, but of interest only to the specialist. But 19th-century easel painting is a dreary waste of realistic-romantic
bandeirantes,
slave-girls, court functions, and landscapes that look more like France or England than Brazil. It is not until the appearance of painters such as Emiliano di Cavalcanti and Candido Portinari that Brazilian painting can be said to have any life of its own.

On first arriving in Brazil, a stranger—if he is at all familiar with them—is struck by how true to Brazilian scenery are Portinari's early pictures: the round, almost conical green hills, the Negro women carrying white bundles on their heads, like ants with their eggs, the children playing
futebol,
the dry, broken graveyards—even details like kites, balloons, and the way the ever-present umbrella is worn hanging from the back of the collar—all are in Portinari's early work.

At present the abstract movement is triumphant, along with a depressingly out-of-date importation called “Concretismo.” (This has also been taken up by some of the younger poets, who produce poems reminiscent of Eugene Jolas and
transition
magazine of the '20s in Paris. The Japanese, notably Manabu Mabe, have made contributions to the abstract movement, but more in their traditional calligraphic style than in that of “action” painters of the west.) The best Brazilian work at the moment seems to be in black-and-white. There are at least half a dozen good engravers, wood-cutters, and lithographers; Feyga Ostrawer, Roberto Delamonica, Edith Berhing, Anna Lyticia; typographers and painters like Aloisio Magalhães.

The São Paulo Biennial, started in 1951 by Francisco Matarazzo, has become an institution like the Biennial of Venice. Although one may have one's doubts about the desirability of bringing together over four thousand works of art at one time, it has undoubtedly greatly stimulated Brazilian painting with its many prizes, travelling scholarships, and opportunities for those who have to stay at home to see at first hand, for the first time, what is being done in the rest of the world. There is a real painting “boom” in Brazil at present; prices are soaring, collectors collecting, and new galleries are opening up every few weeks, it seems, in all the larger cities.

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Brazilian “formal” or “sophisticated” music—it is hard to know exactly what term to use—is a complex subject in spite of its comparatively small body of work. There are Indian, African (and several different African), and Portuguese influences at work directly, and indirectly in the amazing variety of the folk-music. The music-loving Braganzas had their court composers and performers; the Jesuits their sacred operas and processional music from which many of the still-living folk-forms were derived. Quite recently a large body of late-baroque church-music has been discovered in Minas and is being transcribed and recorded, and undoubtedly much more material remains to be discovered and will help to fill in the long silences in Brazilian musical history.

The one big name in 19th-century music is Carlos Gomes, who was befriended all his life by Dom Pedro II. Unfortunately, his European training is now thought to have spoiled whatever native gifts he had. His most famous opera,
The Guarani,
based on the highly romantic novel by José de Alencar about a noble Guarani Indian, had a considerable success in 1870, although it has since been cruelly called “Meyerbeer's best work.” The ballroom of the great semi-abandoned Manaos Opera House is decorated with scenes from
The Guarani,
and
bife-stek Carlos Gomes
still figures on the menus of Manaos restaurants.

The best contemporary composer is Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959). He was melodic, prolific, and fluent, if not over-fluent, and made full use of the richness of Brazilian sources (Portuguese, African, Indian, and popular music); his
Bachianas
and
Ciclo Brasileiro
are well-known outside Brazil. Villa-Lobos also put together a musical textbook for use in schools (using as examples old songs and singing games), the
Guia Practica,
which is considered a model of what such books should be.

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The “poet” is a special figure in Brazil, not at all like the unkown, unread figure of the same name in the United States. There has long been a tradition in Latin countries, old world and new, of poets in the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, vice-consuls, consuls, or ambassadors. In Brazil the word “poet” is actually a term of endearment. A man will fondly address a friend who may be an engineer or a politician as “my poet.” Perhaps this is a relic of the days when all educated men wrote poetry; certainly writing poetry is still commoner here than with us. But in spite of this fondness for the
idea
of the poet as a man of special charm and privilege, unless employed in Foreign Affairs, he has, professionally, an even harder time of it than in the United States. Writing is very poorly paid and there are none of the fellowships and prizes, and a mere handful, compared to the thousands, of academic jobs that make life possible for both poets and prose writers in the United States. The writer has to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or professional journalist; journalism takes the place that teaching does in the United States, and with often just as deadening effect. There is a lack of good magazines and reviews. Every newspaper has its literary page, weekly, sometimes even daily, and it is there that one has to search for the good new poem, the original short story or article, half-lost among the endless warmed-over discussions of Baudelaire or Valéry, of Thomas Aquinas or G. K. Chesterton, and translations of Graham Greene or Mauriac.

The Portuguese language itself is a barrier between Brazilian writers and the public they deserve. For most Americans who study Spanish rarely study Portuguese. More translation can remedy this situation for prose, but poetry is fairly impervious to translations and it is a pity that we remain almost totally ignorant of such fine contemporary poets as Manuel Bandeira (the father-figure of Brazilian poetry), Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Cecilia Meireles, Jorge de Lima, Vinicius de Moraes (who wrote the libretto for the opera that was made into the succesful movie
BLACK ORPHEUS
), João Cabral de Melo Neto—probably the best of the generation after Bandeira, who has written poems of great feeling about the
“flagellados”
(“beaten ones”) of the north-east.

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In Brazil someone who has been brought up a Catholic, in the usual way, left the church, and then returned to it again, is called a “convert.” In somewhat the same sense of conversion, Brazil is now re-discovering the values of its earlier provincial, romantic, and humorous literature, just as we have been re-assessing our Hawthornes and Twains, although on nothing like our stupendous and costly scale. Even allowing for the inevitable differences, almost all Brazilian literature is sympathetic to us: one colonial understands another. With all its naïveté, religiosity (sermons and more sermons), and sentimentality,—it has many of the characteristics of the literature of our own first three hundred years. And as American literature has been divided into “paleface” and “redskin,” so can Brazilian be divided roughly, in the same way, into that of the city and that of the country, those who looked to Europe, tradition, and “correctness,” and those who were drawn to the wilderness, the Indian, the regional, and felt that only new forms could be used for the experience of a new country. Sometimes, as our own literature, the two strains are oddly woven together.

The poets of the “Inconfidentes” sang of cupids and swans and such un-Brazilian fauna. Yet here are a few lines from the best of them, Thomas Antônio Gonzaga, that Manuel Bandeira quotes in his
Anthology of Brazilian Poets of the Romantic Phase.
Gonzaga is addressing his great love, Marília de Dirceu:

“You shall not see the skillful Negro

Separate the heavy emery from the course sand,

And the nuggets of gold already shining

    In the bottom of the
bateia.

You shall not see the virgin forest destroyed,

Nor the burning of the still green underbrush

To fertilize the ground with ashes,

    Nor the seeds being sown in the furrows.

You shall not see them rolling the black packets

Of dry leaves of fragrant tobacco,

Nor pressing out the sweet juice of the cane

    Between the cog-wheels…”

This is a rare moment of realism and accuracy, as evocative of rural Brazil today as when it was written. A
bateia
is the wooden bowl used for panning gold. It is still used, as is the destructive system of slash-and-burn farming. Tobacco,
fumo,
is still sold in long black ropes in the markets, and sugar cane juice, rather like a watery, grassy, molasses, is still a popular drink.

The two outstanding characteristics of the Brazilian romantic poets are their
saudades
and their anti-slavery sentiments. The fact that they were all sent to Coimbra to be educated probably has something to do with the former. They missed the easy, indulged life of young Brazilian gentlemen and suffered from homesickness as acutely as Brazilian students seem to do now at Boston “Tech” or the Sorbonne or Heidelberg. Gonçalves Dias (1823–1864), one of the greatest of the romantics, is responsible for the “Exiles Song,” the “My Country 'Tis of Thee” of Brazil.

“My country has palm-trees

    Where the
sabiá
sings.

The birds don't warble here

    The way they do there…”

And Casimiro de Abreu (1839–1860) repeats:

“If I must die in the flower of my youth,

    My God, let it not be now!

I want to hear the
sabiá
sing

    In the evening, in the orange tree!…” etc.

The
sabiá,
a rather fat, brown thrush, is, precisely, to Brazilian poetry what the nightingale is to English poetry. Carlos Gomes uses its song in the interlude of his opera
THE SLAVE;
Brazilian literature is full of
sabiás.

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.