Prose

As We Like It

Miss Moore and the Delight of Imitation

As far as I know, Miss Marianne Moore is The World’s Greatest Living Observer. The English language is fortunate in occasionally falling heir to such feats of description, say, as this, of lightning:

Flashes lacing two clouds above or the cloud and the earth started upon the eyes in live veins of rincing or riddling liquid white, inched and jagged as if it were the shivering of a bright riband string which had once been kept bound round a blade and danced back into its pleatings.

Or this:

Drops of rain hanging on nails etc. seen with only the lower rim lighted like nails (of fingers).

But they are prose and by Hopkins, and he is dead. Of course Hopkins occasionally did introduce instances of equally startling accuracy into his poetry with such lines as,

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple

Bloom lights the orchard apple …

Or, to quote something approaching nearer Miss Moore’s special provinces, the

Star-eyed strawberry breasted

Throstle …

and the famous

rose-moles all in stipple upon trout …

But Miss Moore has bettered these over and over again, and keeps right on doing it.

The firs stand in a procession, each with an

emerald turkey-foot at the top …

the blades of the oars

moving together like the feet of water-spiders …

The East with its

snails, its emotional

shorthand …

Peter, her immortal cat, with his

small tufts of fronds

or katydid legs above each eye.

and

the shadbones regularly set about his mouth, to droop or rise in unison like the porcupine’s quills …

The swan

with flamingo-colored, maple

leaflike feet.

and the lizard,

stiff,

and somewhat heavy, like fresh putty on the hand.

These things make even our greatest poet, when he attempts something like them, appear full of preconceived notions and over-sentimental. A wounded deer has been abandoned by his “velvet friends.” And Shakespeare is supposed to have been familiar with deer.

The wretched animal heav’d forth such groans

That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat

Almost to bursting, and the big round tears

Cours’d one another down his innocent nose

In piteous chase …

As You Like It

I do not understand the nature of the satisfaction a completely accurate description or imitation of anything at all can give, but apparently in order to produce it the description or imitation must be brief, or compact, and have at least the effect of being spontaneous. Even the best trompe-l’oeil paintings lack it, but I have experienced it in listening to the noise made by a four year old child who could imitate exactly the sound of the water running out of his bath. Long, fine, thorough passages of descriptive prose fail to produce it, but sometimes animal or bird masks at the Museums of Natural History give one (as the dances that once went with them might have been able to do) the same immediacy of identification one feels on reading about Miss Moore’s

Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying that you have a badger

or the butterfly that

flies off

diminishing like wreckage on the sea,

rising and falling easily.

Does it come simply from her gift of being able to give herself up entirely to the object under contemplation, to feel in all sincerity how it is to be it? From whatever this pleasure may be derived, it is certainly one of the greatest the work of Miss Moore gives us.

Sometimes in her poetry such instances “go on” so that there seems almost to be a compulsion to this kind of imitation. The poems seem to say, “These things exist to be loved and honored and we must,” and perhaps the sense of duty shows through a little plainly.

Did he not moralize this spectacle?

O yes, into a thousand similes.

As You Like It

And although the tone is frequently light or ironic the total effect is of such a ritualistic solemnity that I feel in reading her one should constantly bear in mind the secondary and frequently sombre meaning of the title of her first book: Observations.

Miss Moore and Edgar Allan Poe

In the poem “Elephants,” after five stanzas of beautiful description of the elephant and his mahout, Miss Moore suddenly breaks off and remarks in rhetorical disgust,

As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at

much unease

thereby giving dramatic expression to one of the problems of descriptive poetry, although actually she has only used “as if” once, so far. It is annoying to have to keep saying that things are like other things, even though there seems to be no help for it. But it may be noticed that although full of similes, and such brilliant ones that she should never feel the necessity of complaining, she uses metaphor rather sparingly and obliquely. In Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” he points out that it is not until the last two stanzas of “The Raven” that he permits himself the use of any metaphorical expression:

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!

and

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor.

and then says that such expressions “dispose the mind to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated.” He has already stressed the importance of avoiding “the excess of the suggested meaning,” and said that metaphor is a device that must be very carefully employed. Miss Moore does employ it carefully and it is one of the qualities that gives her poetry its steady aura of both reserve and having possibly more meanings, in reserve. Another result is that the metaphor, when used, carries a long way, reverberating like her “pulsation of lighthouse and noise of bell-buoys.…”

Miss Moore has said in conversation that she has been influenced by Poe’s prose, and although it should not be pushed too far, an interesting study could be made of several points of comparison. Miss Moore and Poe are our two most original writers and one feels that Miss Moore would cheerfully subscribe to Poe’s remark on Originality: “The extent to which this has been neglected in versification is one of the most unaccountable things in the world,” and his painful edict that “In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation,” and also that it is greatly assisted by “an extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration.”

In fact, although it might have surprised him, one might almost say that in some respects Miss Moore is Poe’s Ideal Poet, the one he was unable to be himself.

Poe in his prose and Miss Moore in her verse strike a tone of complete truth-telling that is compelling and rare, — Miss Moore’s being so strong as to lend veracity to her slightest comment, inducing such confidence that for years I even believed her when she said,

Dürer would have seen a reason for living

in a town like this, with eight stranded whales

to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house.

I can imagine her writing Poe’s “Chessplayer” in verse, and I can imagine Poe writing parts of “The Hero,” with its melancholy, repeated o’s, and

Where the ground is sour; where there are

weeds of beanstalk height,

snakes’ hypodermic teeth, or

the wind brings the “scarebabe voice”

from the neglected yew set with

the semi-precious cat’s eyes of the owl.

They both take delight in their wide reading and in sharing it, and both are capable of making something unexpected and amusing out of the footnote, that usually unsmiling paragraph.

And both are virtuosi, Miss Moore, of course, to a much higher degree. I do not want to go into problems of versification and shall simply say that the more one reads Miss Moore the more one is inclined to give up such problems and merely exclaim, “How does she do it!” She is able to develop some completely “natural” idea with so many graces and effects of hesitation and changes of mood and pace that one is reminded of what little one knows of the peculiarities of Oriental music. This constant high level of technical skill must cost her incredible effort, although one is rarely aware of it; but what may be an effort for her would for most poets be an impossibility.

Sometimes I have thought that her individual verse forms, or “mannerisms” as they might be called, may have developed as much from a sense of modesty as from the demands of artistic expression; that actually she may be somewhat embarrassed by her own precocity and sensibilities and that her varied verse forms and rhyme schemes and syllabic logarithms are all a form of apology, are saying, “It really isn’t as easy for me as I’m afraid you may think it is.” The precocious child is often embarrassed by his own understanding and is capable of going to great lengths to act his part as a child properly; one feels that Miss Moore sometimes has to make things difficult for herself as a sort of noblesse oblige, or self-imposed taxation to keep everything “fair” in the world of poetry.

Miss Moore and Zoography

This same willingness to do things in such a way as not to show off, not to be superior, is shown in Miss Moore’s amazingly uncondescending feeling for animals. A great deal has been said in the last twenty years about how authors should not condescend to their working class or peasant characters, and the difficulties standing in the way of honesty in such a relationship have been explained and explained. Surely it is also very hard to write about animals without “pastoralizing” them, as William Empson might say, or drawing false analogies.

Come, shall we go and kill us venison?

And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,

Being native burghers of this desert city,

Should, in their own confines, with forked heads

Have their round haunches gor’d.

As You Like It

It was perhaps consoling and popular to think that the animals were just like the citizenry, but how untrue, and one feels Miss Moore would feel, how selfish. There are morals a’plenty in animal life, but they have to be studied out by devotedly and minutely observing the animal, not by regarding the deer as a man imprisoned in a “leathern coat.”

Her unromantic, life-like, somehow democratic, presentations of animals come close to their treatment in Chinese art, and I believe she feels that the Chinese have understood animals better than any other people.

Such are Miss Moore’s gifts of portraying animal physiology and psychology that her unicorn is as real as their dragons:

this animal of that one horn

throwing itself upon which head foremost from a cliff

it walks away unharmed,

proficient in this feat, which like Herodotus,

I have not seen except in pictures.

With all its inseparable combinations of the formally fabulous with the factual, and the artificial with the perfectly natural, her animal poetry seduces one to dream of some realm of reciprocity, a true lingua unicornis.

1948

Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks

Like Miss Brooks’ first book of verse, this explores the life of the Northern urban Negro. The material is the same, the scene has not changed; but here Miss Brooks has turned from her earlier poetic realism to a strain of lyric emotion. She has turned, too, to elaboration and experimentation in language which, although not always successful, shows her desire not only to break out of set patterns but to make the tone of her work as variegated as possible. The story of Annie Allen becomes a kind of kaleidoscopic dream; and the wildly colored images and symbols shake into a design both stirring and moving, as the lyrics of which it is composed draw to their end. The poet’s feeling for form is basic and remarkable. If her sonnets are dramatically projected, they are also classically firm. This underlying firmness, this sense of form, holds the book together despite its moments of extravagance.

1950

XAIPE: 71 Poems by E. E. Cummings

The famous man of little-letters, e. e. cummings, presents here his first book of poems since 1 × 1 appeared in 1944. It is appropriate that the book should appear in the spring, since spring is Mr. Cummings’ favorite season, speaking to him of flowers, rain, new moons, love and joy. Most of the seventy-one poems take up these themes, but there is the usual scattering of involuted and sometimes rather unpleasant epigrams, and this time a few sympathetic and touching portraits as well. Often Mr. Cummings’ approach to poetry reminds one of a smart-alec Greenwich Village child saying to his friends: “Look! I’ve just made up a new game. Let’s all write poems. There! I’ve won!” And in front of the wood-and-coal man’s basement shop, on the wall of the Chinese laundry, along the curbs of the dingy but flourishing park, appear poems and ideograph-poems in hyacinth-colored chalks. The obscene and epigrammatic ones have most of this happy hoodlum quality; in the others he is still playing his game and winning it, but it has been refined into a game resembling a one-man Japanese poetry competition, using the same symbols over and over again, formally, but delicately, freshly and firmly, as no one else can.

In this collection there is a poem in memory of the critic Peter Monroe Jack, a particularly fine one in memory of Ford Madox Ford, one on a wood-and-coal man, and one on “chas sing,” a laundryman. One can still enjoy Cummings’ inexhaustible pleasure in double o’s, parentheses and question marks, but when honi soit qui mal y pense becomes “honey swo R ky mollypants” one feels that something should be done about it. Yet at his best he remains one of our greatest lyricists.

1950

Love from Emily

Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Doctor and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland. Edited by their granddaughter, Theodora Van Wagenen Ward (Harvard University Press; $4).

In a sense, all of Emily Dickinson’s letters are “love-letters.” To her, little besides love, human and divine, was worth writing about, and often the two seemed to fuse. That abundance of detail — descriptions of daily life, clothes, food, travels, etc. — that is found in what are usually considered “good letters” plays very little part in hers. Instead, there is a constant insistence on the strength of her affections, an almost childish daring and repetitiveness about them that must sometimes have been very hard to take. Is it a tribute to her choice of friends, and to the friends themselves, that they could take it and frequently appreciate her as a poet as well? Or is it occasionally only a tribute to the bad taste and extreme sentimentality of the times?

At any rate, a letter containing such, to us at present, embarrassing remarks as, “I’d love to be a bird or a bee, that whether hum or sing, still might be near you,” is rescued in the nick of time by a sentence like, “If it wasn’t for broad daylight, and cooking-stoves, and roosters, I’m afraid you would have occasion to smile at my letters often, but so sure as ‘this mortal’ essays immortality, a crow from a neighboring farmyard dissipates the illusion, and I am here again.” In modern correspondence expressions of feeling have gone underground: but if we are sometimes embarrassed by Emily Dickinson’s letters we are spared the contemporary letter-writer’s cynicism and “humor.”

* * *

This beautifully edited collection of ninety-three letters written to Doctor and Mrs. Holland covers the last thirty-three years of Emily Dickinson’s life. Dr. Holland had begun his career as a rather reluctant country doctor, and he went on to become a wealthy citizen, a popular lecturer, the editor of the Springfield Republican, and finally the founder and editor of Scribner’s Monthly.

It is curious to think of the Dickinson family reading the Springfield Republican as religiously as they must have from the many glancing references to it; but except for generalizations usually turned into metaphors, current events rarely appear in these letters of gratitude and devotion. As in her poetry, Emily Dickinson is interested in Geography (in which “Heaven” seems to be one of the most familiar places) and the Seasons, and in her own combinations of both. “It is also November. The moons are more laconic and the sun-downs sterner, and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.” “February passed like a skate.… My flowers are near and foreign, and I have but to cross the floor to stand in the Spice Isles.” And in the concluding letters, when Mrs. Holland is visiting in Florida, Emily Dickinson speaks of it as if it were Heaven, with which she is familiar, as well as an earthly state of which she is very ignorant.

The use of homely images, and their solidity, remind one over and over of George Herbert, and as the letters grow more terse and epigrammatic, one is reminded not only of Herbert’s poetry but of whole sections of his “Outlandish Proverbs.” And one is grateful for the sketchiness: it is nice for a change to know a poet who never felt the need for apologies and essays, long paragraphs, or even for long sentences. Yet these letters have structure and strength. It is the sketchiness of the water-spider, tenaciously holding to its upstream position by means of the faintest ripples, while making one aware of the current of death and the darkness below.

The careful study of Emily Dickinson’s changing handwriting, appended to this volume, bears out this image pictorially. Among other illustrations there is a charming photograph of Lavinia Dickinson, laughing, and holding one of her innumerable cats that seem to have been a trial to her adored sister. Twenty-nine of the letters are included in the most recent edition of Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, with an introduction by Mark Van Doren (World; $3.75). Mrs. Holland died believing that all the others had been lost, but some sixty more have now been found and further ones may yet come to light.

1951

The Riddle of Emily Dickinson

By Rebecca Patterson (434 pp.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company; $4.50).

Why is is that so many books of literary detective-work, even when they are better authenticated, better written, and more useful in their conclusions than Mrs. Patterson’s, seem finally just unpleasant? And why — but perhaps it is rather exactly because: in order to reach a single reason for anything as singular and yet manifold as literary creation, it is necessary to limit to the point of mutilation the human personality’s capacity for growth and redirection. It could not very well be a pleasant process to observe.

For four hundred pages Mrs. Patterson tracks down the until now unknown person (she believes it to have been a person, not persons) for whom Emily Dickinson is supposed to have cherished a hopeless passion and to whom she is supposed to have written every one of her love poems. This person Mrs. Patterson proves, to her own satisfaction at least, to have been another woman, a Mrs. Kate Anthon (to use her second married name), a school friend of Emily Dickinson’s sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson. She came to visit Susan Dickinson, next door to Emily Dickinson, in Amherst in 1859; she was then a young widow who preferred to go by her maiden name of Kate Scott. The two young women met and fell in love; about a year later Kate Scott broke it off in some way, and Emily Dickinson had been christened and launched on her life of increasing sorrow and seclusion. It was all as simple as that.

That her thesis is partially true might have occurred to any reader of Emily Dickinson’s poetry — occurred on one page to be contradicted on the next, that is — but even so, why is it necessary for us to learn every detail of Kate Scott’s subsequent life for fifty-seven years after she dealt Emily Dickinson this supposedly deadly blow? It is interesting enough to read: she was an attractive, generous woman who travelled a great deal, a devoted wife as well as an effusively affectionate friend — but none of this seems to have much to do with “the riddle of Emily Dickinson.” Perhaps Mrs. Patterson is trying at such length to establish the fact that Mrs. Anthon was capable of the relationship Mrs. Patterson thinks she was — which again doesn’t seem to prove much, considering the lengths of the lives of both women, the enormous emotional vitality both obviously had, and the number and variety of people in Kate Scott’s life, and even, although of course to a much lesser degree, in Emily Dickinson’s.

According to the book-jacket, Mrs. Patterson has long been an admirer of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. In the avidity of her search for “proof,” this fact seems to have been lost sight of, as well as a few more: the possibility of a poet’s writing from other sources than autobiographical ones, the perfectly real enjoyment in living expressed in many of the poems, the satisfaction that Emily Dickinson must have felt in her work, no matter what, and, quite simply, the more demonstrative manners of another period. When the poems are quoted they are used or mis-used merely as bits of “evidence,” and poor Mrs. Anthon’s exuberant underlinings in the books of poetry she carried about with her are subjected to the same treatment.

These four hundred pages are still many sizes too small for Emily Dickinson’s work. Whether one likes her poetry or not, whether it wrings one’s heart or sets one’s teeth on edge, nevertheless it exists, and in a world far removed from the defenseless people and events described in this infuriating book. Or, as a poetic friend of mine better summarized it:

“Kate Scott!

Great Scot!”

1951

What the Young Man Said to the Psalmist

Pantomime, A Journal of Rehearsals. By Wallace Fowlie (Henry Regnery; $3.50).

Mr. Fowlie is an unabashed New Englander, and, to him, “things are not what they seem.” “Art is long,” though, at least French literature is, and there is something very disarming about the picture of a serious little Boston, or Brookline, boy becoming so infatuated with a foreign language and culture that when he read Baudelaire’s Le Balcon it “flooded me with the desire to come to these poems with more experience than I had.”

Chapter III of his autobiographical book, Pantomime, begins with these sentences: “I must have been about fifteen years old when I rode on a swan boat for the first time. That ride marked my initial distinct awareness of Boston as a city.” He then describes a swan boat ride: the boats themselves, that “originated from Boston’s early enthusiasm for Lohengrin,” and the city, revolving about him “in a cyclical panorama.” These few pages give an almost too neat sample of the quality of Mr. Fowlie’s book. He says of himself: “Any happiness I have ever had … has been learned and rehearsed studiously, prepared and meditated on … a performance of a part fairly well insured against failure.” It is as if he had waited until the fairly advanced age of fifteen, waited until he had formed the association with Wagner and grown familiar with Boston’s buildings and statues, before he was ready to embark.

Tremont Temple and its Baptist sermons, Symphony Hall, the Harvard Glee Club, the Museum of Fine Arts — all these were part of my own childhood background, and as I read his book I could not help making comparisons between Mr. Fowlie’s early impressions and my own. My own first ride on a swan boat occurred at the age of three and is chiefly memorable for the fact that one of the live swans paddling around us bit my mother’s finger when she offered it a peanut. I remember the hole in the black kid glove and a drop of blood. I do not want to set myself up as a model of facing the sterner realities of swan boat rides in order to discredit Mr. Fowlie’s idealization, — but there is remarkably little of blood, sweat, or tears in Mr. Fowlie’s book.

It would be unfair to infer any lack of conflict in Mr. Fowlie himself; he is human and it must be there. However it is fair to criticize that lack as the chief literary fault of the book. These twelve episodic, carefully edited chapters from the life of a scholar and teacher are interesting and often amusing, but one wants more of the facts. The curious thing about it is that the one fact responsible for the lack of conflict is at the same time the most interesting fact of all.

Most children are fascinated by a foreign language; many make up a shared or solitary gibberish, or even pig-latin will serve to give them a sense of privacy and power. But Mr. Fowlie, as later for the swan boat ride, waited patiently for his own language to appear, and he was amply rewarded. In the seventh grade he began studying French, and immediately he became an enchanted boy. The accent, the grammar, the literature — everything about the French language was magical to him, and like Aladdin’s lamp, or the string that leads the hero through the maze, it solved his problems. It provided him with constant interest and, later on, work, and as a highly formalized exercise it offered him the “mask” he had been seeking without knowing it to put him at his ease in the world. Apparently it got him safely through the rigours of adolescence as well, although he presents these in all their solemnity.

The most entertaining sections of the book are those dealing with his early years of mastering French: Paul Claudel mystifying an audience at the Copley Plaza, his first Parisian pension, (“Mangez-vous les haricots à Chicago?”) the scenes with his diction teacher, Mlle. Fayolle-Faylis. He is capable of seeing a joke on himself, as for example in the account of his sedate evening “on the town” in Paris with a more worldly friend. His unnecessary asthma cure, and his life-long passion for the movies are equally real.

It is in these more casual episodes that the charm of the book lies, and in them Mr. Fowlie is more spontaneous than he gives himself credit for. The story of his work on Ernest Psichari, and his interviews with figures of French literature are laborious in contrast. And he has chosen to interpret his various experiences by means of a mystique of clowns and angels, as the spectator and/or actor, that I find hard to follow. But he has attempted to present or suggest some troublesome frames of mind, and being, as I said, a good New Englander, to give the psalmist an honest answer, even in arrière pensée.

1952

The Manipulation of Mirrors

Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue. Edited and translated by William Jay Smith (Grove; $4).

In this book, William Jay Smith, poet and translator of Valéry Larbaud, gives us a judicious sampling of almost everything Jules Laforgue wrote in his tragically short life: a generous number of poems, two of the Moralités légendaires, travel pieces and letters, and excerpts from hard to find or hitherto unpublished “Landscapes and Impressions” and criticism. At the end there is a biographical sketch of Laforgue and a bibliography. Mr. Smith’s introductions to each section are informal but informative; his translations, on the whole, are models of accuracy. The book is obviously a labor of love, and for the reader without French it should make an excellent introduction to Laforgue. The prose reads easily; the poems — but that, of course, is a different matter and perhaps it would be better for both reviewer and the reader new to Laforgue to begin with the prose.

The stories “date” more than the other prose, but they are still good and still amusing. In Hamlet, or the Consequences of Filial Piety (1886) Laforgue achieves what Warren Ramsey in his Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance, calls his “ironic equilibrium.” It is a sort of acrobat’s small landing-stage from which he surveys the scene of past flights of fancy and plans more daring ones — which, alas, he did not live to make. Hamlet says: “To be — well, to be if one must.” He complains: “There are no longer any fine young ladies; they have all taken up nursing.” After the debacle in the graveyard he tells himself, “Ah, how I must work this winter with all this new material!” It is all still recognizable and topical. The earlier story, The Miracle of the Roses, is much slighter, and mainly illustrates the poet’s obsession with death; it prefigures Zuleika Dobson and Firbank. Also — an old argument about translating — should the translator, when possible, limit his choice of words and phrases to the period of the text? I found expressions like “a real son-of-a-bitch,” “a hopeless ham,” “corny,” and “well-heeled,” grating badly on my ear.

In the travel pieces, Berlin, the City, and the Court, Laforgue (who was reader to the Empress Augusta for five years) presents German royalty, militarism, and taste in a set of beautiful neat miniatures, always ironic, naturally. Then comes an article written to introduce a show of French impressionists to Berlin. The banker, Charles Ephrussi, one of the first to encourage the impressionists and collect their paintings, was Laforgue’s friend, and Laforgue knew and understood his contemporary painters better than poets frequently do. (It was Ephrussi who obtained the post of reader for him.) If, as Mr. Smith remarks, Laforgue had odd ideas about the evolution of the eye, never mind — there was nothing the matter with his own. His poetry is filled with the same visual excitement as the impressionists’, and the eight and a half pages of Landscapes and Impressions often sound the way the impressionists look. But these pages also throw light on the poetry. I wanted to quote “Noon”:

One half the earth is lit by the sun, the other half black and spotted with fire, gas, resin, or candle flame.… In one place people are fighting, there are massacres; in another, there is an execution, in another a robbery … below men are sleeping, dying … the black ribbons of funeral processions winding toward the yew trees … endless. And with all this on its back, how can the enormous earth go on hurtling through eternal space with the terrible rapidity of a lightning flash?

This reminds us again that no poet has been so constantly aware of the whole solar system: burning, whirling, immense. Laforgue’s “ironic equilibrium” is like a seesaw; the solar system weights one end and our tiny planet, laden with his clowns, casinos, and pianos, lit by “fire, gas, resin, or candle flame,” the other. He never lets us forget outer space; it is the margin of his staccato lines.

The section of Literary Criticism consists of jottings on Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Corbière. Of Baudelaire: “He was the first to write about himself in a moderate, confessional manner and to leave off the inspired manner.” Add to this his remark in a letter to his sister: “I find it stupid to speak in a booming voice and adopt a platform manner,” and obvious as it may seem, now, one has marked the shift in feeling that did more than anything else to transform English poetry after 1908.

* * *

The letters are so good that I would like to see Mr. Smith translate a whole book of them sometime. But why does he say, “Few young poets have at any time written with such candor and gaiety”? It seems to me a good many have. (But then, I have just been reading Coleridge’s youthful letters, full of candor and gaiety, too, and he, by himself, may seem like quite a few.) At the age of twenty-one, Laforgue, poor and alone in Paris, writes to his favorite sister: “My depression began to constitute a sort of artistic joy.” And, “Life is gross, that’s true — but for heaven’s sake, when it comes to poetry, let us be elegant as the sweet william.…” Shortly after his marriage he writes: “We have a good fire, a lovely lamp, some good tea in the tea set the Empress had [?] given me.” Then, “You haven’t heard anything for a long while about my literary affairs.… you can be sure … that I have the right to be proud of myself; there is no literary man of my generation who is promised such a future.… Alas, how I long to get well.…” A month later he was dead of tuberculosis, at the age of twenty-seven. Because Laforgue is so quiet, so disciplined, so “ironic,” always, it is worse than Keats, almost — and yet one who accomplished so much, who did it so superlatively well, and to whom all modern poets owe such a debt, scarcely needs our pity.

To go back to the poetry. By now everyone knows how to review a book of translated poetry. First, one says it’s impossible. Second, one implies that the translator is an ignoramus, or if that’s going too far, that he has missed the plays on words; and then one carps about the inevitable mistakes. The first objection is still true: it is impossible to translate poetry, or perhaps only one aspect can be translated at a time, and each poem needs several translations. But Mr. Smith has made an exceptionally good try and I think his faithfulness to the French will impress most reviewers. But the quickness, the surprise, the new sub-acid flavor, have disappeared. Mr. Smith is too intelligent not to know this; he says:

Translating poetry is like converging on a flame with a series of mirrors, mirrors of technique and understanding, until the flame is reflected in upon itself in a wholly new and foreign element. Such an operation is rarely, if ever, successful: the manipulation of the mirrors depends to such an extent on the sensibility and skill of the translator.

Besides being a pretty image, this is a true one, as anyone who has ever tried translating poetry will know. But surely, besides sensibility and skill, it depends (about 50 per cent, I’d say) on luck: the possibilities of the second language’s vocabulary. Without luck the worst happens, the flame goes out, and we shouldn’t blame Mr. Smith when it does.

Lune, ô dilettante Lune,

A tous les climats commune,

Tu vis hier le Missouri,

Et les remparts de Paris,

Les fiords bleus de la Norwège,

Les pôles, les mers, que sais-je?

“Moon, oh dilettante Moon,

With all the climates in common,

You saw the Missouri yesterday,

And the ramparts of Paris,

The blue fjords of Norway,

The poles, the oceans, and what else?”

But if anyone thinks he could do better he should sit down and try. Some of the poems, those with longer lines and those in free verse, are more successful.

It is a pity the poems have not been printed bi-lingually, or at least with a facsimile or two in the poet’s curious, “artistic,” but legible hand-writing. The four sketches from the notebooks are worth seeing, but Laforgue seems to have been so much of a piece (or is this a delusion we have about certain poets? It seems true of Hopkins, too): letters, poems, life — even to his appearance, that surely there should be a picture of that reserved, composed young face under its top hat? And even if this is not a critical study, shouldn’t Verlaine’s influence at least be mentioned? And — this has nothing to do with Mr. Smith’s work, of course — the 1956 abstract water-color on the jacket doesn’t go at all with Laforgue’s sketches of 1885 inside.

Mr. Smith also says:

Laforgue was one of the few poets who could write convincing poetry around the tremendous discoveries of his age.… Laforgue was in so many respects in advance of his time that it is not surprising to find him writing poems one would not have thought possible until the present day.

I am not sure who that “one” is — but isn’t this putting the cart before the horse? Do our three or four great poets who were born around the time of Laforgue’s death, seventy years ago now, and who derive the most from him in one way or another, give us much more of what we are appalled to recognize as “our” time than he did? The truth may be, I think, that poetically we are now away behind it.

* * *

This book should be most useful to: 1. very young, almost embryonic, poets and critics; 2. the more knowing reader whose languages don’t include French or who is lazy about reading it; 3. anyone at all curious about the difficult work of translation. These should read it and then, if they are also interested to the slightest degree in poetry, they should supply themselves with a French grammar and dictionary and the two volumes of the poems, published by Mercure de France, or even with the small volume in the Poètes d’aujourd’hui series, which skimps the poetry but is a fascinating little book, with pictures, and then, well — perhaps sign up at the nearest Berlitz School.

1956

Introduction to The Diary of “Helena Morley”

Minha Vida de Menina: The Book and Its Author

When I first came to Brazil, in 1952, I asked my Brazilian friends which Brazilian books I should begin reading. After naming some of Machado de Assis’s novels or short stories, or Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, they frequently recommended this little book. Two or three even said it was the best thing that had appeared in Brazilian letters since Machado de Assis, and then they were apt to launch into animated exchanges of their favorite stories from it.

In English the title means “My Life as a Little Girl,” or “Young Girl,” and that is exactly what the book is about, but it is not reminiscences; it is a diary, the diary actually kept by a girl between the ages of twelve and fifteen, in the far-off town of Diamantina, in 1893–1895. It was first published in 1942 in an edition of 2,000 copies, chiefly with the idea of amusing the author’s family and friends, and it was never advertised. But its reputation spread in literary circles in Rio de Janeiro and there was a demand for it, so in 1944 a second edition was brought out, then two more, in 1948 and 1952, making 10,000 copies in all. George Bernanos, who was living in the country as an exile when it first appeared, discovered it and gave away a good many copies to friends, a fact to which the author and her husband modestly attribute much of its success. He wrote the author a letter which has been used, in part, on the jackets of later editions. Copies of Minha Vida de Menina are now presented every year as prize-books to students of the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Rio.

The more I read the book the better I liked it. The scenes and events it described were odd, remote, and long ago, and yet fresh, sad, funny, and eternally true. The longer I stayed on in Brazil the more Brazilian the book seemed, yet much of it could have happened in any small provincial town or village, and at almost any period of history — at least before the arrival of the automobile and the moving-picture theatre. Certain pages reminded me of more famous and “literary” ones: Nausicaa doing her laundry on the beach, possibly with the help of her freed slaves; bits from Chaucer; Wordsworth’s poetical children and country people, or Dorothy Wordsworth’s wandering beggars. Occasionally entries referring to slavery seemed like notes for an unwritten, Brazilian, feminine version of Tom Sawyer and Nigger Jim. But this was a real, day-by-day diary, kept by a real girl, and anything resembling it that I could think of had been observed or made up, and written down, by adults. (An exception is Anne Frank’s diary; but its forced maturity and closed atmosphere are tragically different from the authentic child-likeness, the classical sunlight and simplicity of this one.) I am not sure now whether someone suggested my translating it or I thought of it myself, but when I was about half-way through the book I decided to try.

I learned that “Helena Morley” was still very much alive; that the name was the pseudonym of Senhora Augusto Mario Caldeira Brant and that she was living in Rio, well known and much loved in Rio society. Her husband was then, although almost eighty years old, acting as president of the Bank of Brazil for the second time. The poet Manuel Bandeira, an old friend of the family, kindly gave me an introduction. Armed with a friend, Lota de Macedo Soares, to serve as interpreter because my spoken Portuguese was very limited, I went to call.

Senhora Brant, or Dona Alice as I shall call her in the Brazilian way (“Helena” and “Morley” are both names from her English father’s family), now lives in a large, stuccoed, tile-roofed house, on the street that borders the “Lagôa,” or lagoon. It is a fashionable place to live. The house is set in a yard with flowerbeds, coconut palms, eight fruit-trees and a servants’ house and vegetable garden at the back. A stuccoed fence and wooden gates protect it from the street. A large Cadillac is sometimes parked in the driveway, and its mulatto chauffeur wears a white yachting cap: Cadillac, chauffeur, and white cap are all contemporary Rio fashion. Nearby rise the extravagant Rio mountains and across the lagoon towers the one called the “Gavea,” or crow’s-nest, because its shape reminded the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers of the lookout platforms on their little vessels.

On our first visit we were ushered into a large living-room, parlor, rather, with its silk and lace curtains closely drawn, luxuriously furnished: vases, bronzes, and clocks on small tables, rugs, a chandelier, chairs and sofas covered in gold-colored satin. This room is divided from the hall and another living-room opposite by a fence and gate-way of wrought iron, painted white. One of Dona Alice’s daughters, Dona Sarita, appeared and started talking to my friend. Although they had not met before, very shortly they were identifying and placing each other’s relatives, something that seems to happen in Brazil as quickly as it does in the south of the United States, when Dona Alice herself came in.

She is a large woman, very tall for a Brazilian, looking younger than seventy-six, her hair not yet entirely white, with a handsome, lively, high-cheekboned face lit up by two small but exceedingly bright and gay reddish-brown eyes. Her half-English blood shows, perhaps, in the unusual fairness of her skin, the fairness that made her liable to the freckles she used to complain of in her diary. She began talking, laughing and talking, immediately, and in no time at all we were telling each other stories and Dona Alice was leaning forward to pat our knees with the greatest ease and intimacy. (This warmth and ease in meeting strangers is a Brazilian characteristic especially charming to Nordic visitors.) At the first interview a great deal of the conversation was lost to me. However, I did gather that Dona Alice was proud of the book she had unwittingly written more than sixty years before, pleased at the thought of its being put into English, and still somewhat puzzled by its success in Brazil and the fact that George Bernanos, French people, and more recently, Americans, had seemed to like it, too. I could also recognize her re-telling of some of the anecdotes in the very words of the diary, or in more detail, and with a great deal of hilarity.

Presently Dr. Brant came home from the Bank of Brazil, a small, modest-appearing man of brilliant intelligence, who also looks much younger than his age. He is proud of his wife and it was he who had undertaken to put together all the old scraps and notebooks and prepare them for publication. He has been a lawyer, a journalist, and was five times elected to the National Congress; under the Vargas dictatorship he was exiled, and spent five years in France and England. He reads English; that day, I remember, he told me he was reading Boswell’s Journals. In answer to my question he said no, that Dona Alice had never written anything since her early diaries, nothing, that was, but “letters, letters, letters!”

I don’t believe we accepted the invitation to stay to dinner on this first call, but we did on our second, even though we had taken along two friends, admirers of the book, to meet Dona Alice. Dona Sarita, another daughter, a son-in-law, a grandson of sixteen or so, a nephew — the number of people at the long table seemed to be constantly expanding and contracting. Dona Alice, very much a matriarch, sat at the head, Dr. Augusto Mario beside her at her left. She told stories, ladled soup, told stories, carved, told stories and served the multiple Brazilian desserts, occasionally interrupting herself to scold the maid, or the nephew, who used up a whole cake of soap, or so she said, every time he took a bath, in a sort of head-tone of mock-rage that disturbed no one in the slightest.

On one of our visits we were taken upstairs in Dona Alice’s own elevator, to a panelled library and shown various copies of the book, the original of the letter from Bernanos, and some old photographs. By then it had been settled that I was to do the translation and I had hoped they might have some photographs of Diamantina and the people in the diary. They did have a few, but in poor condition. One was of Dona Alice’s old home in the Old Cavalhada: plastered stone, two-storied, severe, with a double door opening onto a wide stoop. I said that I would like to get a copy of it for the book, but Dona Alice and Dona Sarita said Oh no, not that house, suggesting that I use a picture of Dona Alice’s present house on the Lagôa in Rio. I’m not sure that my arguments for using the old photographs of Diamantina ever quite convinced them.

Diamantina is in the state of Minas Gerais (General Mines) and mineiros, miners, as the people who come from there are called, have the reputation for being shrewd and thrifty. There is a saying that the mineiro eats out of an open drawer, ready to close it quickly if unexpected company shows up. Dona Alice’s hospitality belied this legend, but once when Lota de Macedo Soares went to see her she found Dona Alice seated in the upstairs hall darning linen, and was rather taken aback to be asked severely if she didn’t employ her time on such chores when she was at home.

The diaries, I found, had been cut short where they now end by Dr. Brant because the next year marks his own appearance in them, and his acceptance as a suitor. I feel it is a pity he so firmly omits every incident of their courtship. By the time she was seventeen, “Helena” had already received five proposals of marriage from “foreign” miners living in Diamantina. Her girl cousins and friends had been reduced to hinting to her that if she didn’t want any of her suitors perhaps she would let them have them. She had indeed become what she admits to yearning to be in her diary: “the leading girl of Diamantina.” In true Brazilian fashion she chose a Brazilian and a cousin and at eighteen married Dr. Augusto Mario, whose family had been prominent in Diamantina since the eighteenth century. I am sure she has never for a moment regretted turning down those other offers, and that this is one of those rare stories that combine worldly success and a happy ending.

One story she told us, not in the book, was about the first time she received a serious compliment from one of the rejected suitors and at last became convinced that she was pretty, really pretty. She said that she had sat up in bed studying her face, or what she could see of it by the light of a candle, in a broken piece of looking-glass, all night long.

* * *

Dr. Brant has provided the following information about “Helena Morley’s” English background:

“The family name is really Dayrell. Dona Alice’s grandfather, Dr. John Dayrell, studied medicine in London. He married a Miss Alice Mortimer, the daughter of an Irish Protestant, Henry Mortimer, who was, or had been, a government official in Barbados, where he also had a sugar-cane plantation producing sugar and rum. His children were educated in London, and it was there that Alice Mortimer met and married Dr. John Dayrell.

“Dr. Dayrell left England between 1840 and 1850 to serve as physician to a gold mining concern at Morro Velho [Old Hill] belonging to the famous English São João del Rey Mining Company. A short while later there was a flood in the mine, and work came to a halt. The other officials went back to England, but Dr. Dayrell, who had a ‘weak chest,’ remained in Brazil and went to live in Diamantina, a town 5,000 feet high and famous for its fine climate.

“In Diamantina he established himself as a doctor, acquired a fazenda [farm or country-seat] near town, and practised medicine for about 40 years. He and his wife were the only Protestants in the town. He had eight children, two born in England and the rest in Diamantina.”

Richard Burton, in Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil (Tinsley Brothers, London, 1869), speaks of meeting Dr. Dayrell in 1867, and also Felisberto Dayrell, the real name of “Helena Morley’s” father, who was even then at work mining diamonds, as he is later, throughout the pages of his daughter’s diary.

Diamantina

Like most children, Helena Morley seems to have taken her surroundings and the scenery of the region where she lived very much for granted. There are few direct references to them in Minha Vida de Menina. She does speak of the streams where she and her sister and brothers take baths, or catch the most fish, of places where there are wildflowers and fruits, or where she can set her bird-traps. And she says a good many times that she likes “the country better than the city,” the “city” being, of course, the tiny provincial town of Diamantina. But whatever love of nature she has seems part utilitarian and part, the greater part, sheer joy at not being in school.

However, what impresses the occasional traveller who visits Diamantina these days first of all is its wild and extraordinary setting. Diamantina, the highest town in Brazil, is about 200 miles northeast of Belo Horizonte, the modern capital of Minas Gerais, a state bigger than Texas. At the time of the diary the railway had not yet been put through; now, sixty years later, trains still run but are already outmoded for passengers, and a once-a-day plane makes the trip from the capital in a little less than an hour.

I went there in May, when the worst of the rains are over but roads are supposedly not yet too dusty. After leaving Belo Horizonte the plane flies higher and higher, the land below grows rockier and rockier, wilder and more desolate; not a sign of life is to be seen. A high sea of waves and crests of steely gray rock, eroded and fragmented, appears; the rolling land between is covered with greenish grass, but barely covered. There are unexpected streams among the rocks; slender waterfalls fall into small black pools or the streams fan out glittering over beds of white sand. Never a village nor a house; only hundreds of the pock marks, or large pits, of old gold and diamond mines, showing red and white.

The plane comes down on a bare, slightly swelling field. There is nothing to be seen but a long red dust-cloud settling behind it, an open shed with names and comic heads splashed on it in black paint, and a wretched little house with a baby and a few hens against a ragged washing strung on a barbed-wire fence. But the air is crisp and delicious and the horizon is rimmed all around with clear-etched peaks of rock. The three or four passengers descend, immediately feeling that they are up and exclaiming about the change in temperature. There is no sign of Diamantina. The highest peak of rock, to the northeast, is the mountain of Itambé, sharp and deceptively near.

A lone taxi drives to town. A church tower suddenly appears between the brown-green waves of grass and the wilder, broken waves of gigantic rocks; then other church towers, and then almost the whole of the red-tiled cluster of roofs comes into sight at once. The town climbs one steep hill, extends sidewise over a lower one and down the other side. The highway enters from above along the line of the railway, passing under the striped arm of a police “barrier.”

There are sixteen churches, most of them diminutive, no more than chapels; the Cathedral is new and very ugly. The famous churches of the gold-mining town of Ouro Prêto are small, too, but with their baroque façades trimmed with green soapstone, their heavy curves and swirls and twin mustard-pot towers, they are opulent and sophisticated, while the little churches of Diamantina are shabby, silent, and wistful. For one thing, although they are built of stone, plastered and painted white, the window and door frames are of wood, in dark blues, reds, or greens, or combinations of all three colors. Ornamentation is skimpy or nonexistent, and belfries or clock-towers are square. The comparative poverty of the town is shown in the way, once the walls were up, the rest of the façade and the tower were simply constructed of boards and painted white to match the stone. Because of the steepness of the streets there is often a flight of stone steps at an angle across the front and off one side, and some churches are still fenced in by high old blue or red picket fences, giving them a diffident, countrified appearance.

The Church of the Rosário that figures prominently in Helena’s diary, standing next door to her grandmother’s house as it does, is still the most impressive. It is the Negroes’ church, built by slaves in the middle of the eighteenth century; inside are three black saints: St. Benedict, St. Iphigenia, and St. Somebody; his name was unidentifiable. There are three crystal chandeliers, a great deal of red dust and faded blue paint, and a slightly rickety blue gallery for the black choir. The church has settled and everything is now askew. As in many old Brazilian churches, the ceilings are made of narrow boards, so that the scenes from the Life of the Virgin painted on them, copied from heaven knows what hand-me-down sources, are scored through by black lines. These ceilings have a sad appeal, like letters written in old copy-book handwriting on lined paper.

In front of this church there is a big tree of the ficus family. Looking up into its branches one is surprised to see a large black beam stuck in them, crosswise, then a rusty lantern and other indistinguishable rusty odds and ends that have no business being thirty feet up off the ground, in a tree. This is one of the town’s modest “sights,” and proves to be what is left of an enormous crucifix that once stood where the tree now stands. The air-borne seed started growing out from the side of the cross, grew upwards and downwards and took root, and now has taken over, broken up, and lifted the whole cross in the air: ladder, lantern, pliers, hammer and all.

These crosses are a common feature of the countryside around Diamantina, sometimes with all their accoutrements, sometimes bare or simply with stiff wooden streamers arranged over the arms and a flat tin rooster on top. The bird called João de Barro, John of the Mud, or Clay, builds his beehive-shaped adobe nests on the arms, and the hammock bird slings his woven ones underneath. One cross, on the high ridge of rock opposite the town, now burns brightly at night with hundreds of electric light bulbs. At Sopa (soup), where Helena’s father went “to open a mine,” there is a fine one, with a white skull and cross-bones on the black wood, silvered Roman centurions’ helmets, and a flat rose-red “seamless garment” like a pattern for a child’s dress. It stands near a small church known as the “Chinese Church” because the eaves of the roof and tower are turned upwards in Oriental style, a common feature of Brazilian colonial architecture, traced directly to the Portuguese colony of Macão. One becomes accustomed to it in Rio de Janeiro, but here far off in a desolate countryside it is strange to come across this church like a baby pagoda, and a crucifix almost as tall, loaded with its grim set of Christian iconography-toys.

The interiors of Helena’s various churches are disappointing, cramped and musty, the Portuguese-style wedding-cake altars crowded with old artificial flowers and incongruously dressed, bewigged saints. The confessionals, however, are sometimes quaint and pretty: upright boards about five feet high; the priest sits on one side on a chair, the penitent kneels on the other; but the boards are gilded and painted in pastel blues and pinks, the upper part pierced with holes like a colander, or with long slits that make them vaguely resemble Biblical musical instruments, possibly some sort of organ. And the “masts” Helena speaks of as being set up on certain holy days lie in the sacristies or along the side aisles of their churches the rest of the year, big as telephone poles, painted in winding blue and white stripes.

I came upon the Church of the Amparo, that figures in the diary, unexpectedly, as it was getting dark. Its trim is dark peacock blue; on top a rusty rooster perches on a rusty globe; there is a minute balcony on either side of a large, faded coat of arms cut out of tin above the door, and over it a three-dimensional Dove of the Holy Spirit, dimly illuminated, nesting behind a quatrefoil window. Seen suddenly blocking the end of an alleyway, this church is stricken but dignified, like a person coming towards one whom one expects to beg, who doesn’t beg after all.

Some of the church clocks by which Helena told the time have been removed. At about seven o’clock the light leaves the town rapidly and the surrounding sea of rocks, and the peak of Itambé, turn red. A few church-bells ring and then a great noise comes from the loud-speaker over the Cathedral door and reverberates all over town. Ave Maria, gratia plena; the town vibrates with it and the light bulbs on the high cross opposite snap into activity. It is the hour of the rosary, Helena’s terço, which caused her so much “suffering” at family prayers and which is now broadcast every evening during the month of May. On Sundays the same loud-speaker is used to draw people to mass; at five o’clock it was blaring out The Stars and Stripes Forever.

In spite of these innovations and the Betty Grable film showing at the one cinema, the town has changed very little since the youthful Helena lived there and raced up and down its steep streets. Most of the streets have no sidewalks, some have narrow ones, two feet or so wide, long slabs of greenish stone raised a little above the cobblestones, the pé de muleque, or “ragamuffin’s foot,”—that is, the confection we call peanut brittle, which it is supposed to resemble. Down the middle of the street runs another strip of long stones, set flush, much easier to walk on than the sidewalks that every so often stop altogether, or break up into steps. These footpaths are called capistranas, after a mayor of Ouro Prêto, who introduced them there.

The houses are thick-walled and solid, in the middle of the town of two or even three stories, but as one gets away from the Cathedral they become smaller and lower and the tile roofs turn to thatched ones. The taller houses have balconies, formerly often completely covered in by the lattice-work cages, called muxarabis (from the Arabian muxara, a shelter), showing the influence of the Moors on the architecture and way of life of Portugal. From them the women could watch what went on in the streets, in an Oriental seclusion. On either side of the windows giving onto these balconies are little lanterns, globes of colored or milk glass, luminárias. (The word has been extended to mean a kind of small cream-filled tart, highly thought of by our diarist.) The same kind of globe, without lights, decorates the railings, and sometimes Tecoma vines or grape-vines are trained along the ironwork.

The window frames are curved at the top, with double sashes of a dozen small panes each. Here the trimming becomes confusing, since some of the wooden frames are marbleized or painted to imitate stone, and some of the stone ones are painted to imitate grained wood. A good many of the windows still have stencils on the lower panes, a form of folk-art that also served to protect the privacy of rooms right on the street. A paper stencil in a formalized leaf-and-flower or other design is held against the glass and patted with a rag dipped in white paint. The effect is very decorative, like frost on the window panes in northern climates, only geometrical. The wide overhang of the eaves contributes to the town’s surprisingly Oriental air, and this overhang is filled in solid with molding and is a favorite place for colored stripes and other ornamentation. The houses are in admirably bold or pretty colors. I particularly liked a crushed-strawberry pink one, with a double staircase of blue, and window frames and under-eaves marbleized in the same blue. There are mustard-colored houses with bright yellow and dark green shutters, white with dark blue and peach, mauve with dark blue and yellow. So that passers-by will not be drenched in the rainy season, the mouths of the rain-pipes are carried out two feet or more, across the sidewalks, and the funnels flare like trumpets. It is as if a band had suddenly stopped playing. Sometimes they have tin petals or feathers down them and around the mouth, and this decoration is repeated in tiles set edgewise up the ridges of the roofs, dragon-like and very “Chinese.”

The grandmother’s house still stands, to the right of the Rosário Church, but the Teatro Isabel, formerly on the other side, has been torn down and in its place is a large baby-pink jail from whose barred windows a drunken prisoner yelled at me incomprehensibly. The house is low, its stoop just a few inches off the ground, a deceptively small-looking house with a sweeping, concave old tile roof. The woman who lives there now knew Minha Vida de Menina and its author and kindly showed me through. The old rooms for slaves, extending along the street by the church, are let out. Inside there is room after room, high, square, sadly neglected, almost devoid of furniture. The walls are a yard thick, wooden shutters can be closed and barred on the inside; the ceilings are of boards or woven rushes painted white, the two common Brazilian types. After a good many of these high dark rooms we reached the kitchen, where a girl was cooking over an open fire. Stoves here consist of a long iron plate with four pot-holes in it, laid on the edges of a stone trough full of embers. A wood called candeia is commonly used. It has a peculiar sweetish smell, sickening until one gets used to it; at the dinner-hour this sweetish stench hovers bluely over Brazilian towns and villages.

Behind the house the grandmother’s former garden covers about five acres, sloping down to a brook and a jungle of banana trees. There are huge jaboticaba trees, the same ones that Helena used to climb into for refuge. There are a few beds of lettuce and cabbages, and a grove of coffee trees, but everything is overgrown and gone to seed and it is hard to imagine how it must have looked in the old days, tended by the grandmother’s ex-slaves. A big sociable pig stood up on his hind legs in his pen, to watch us.

One of the handsomest buildings is Helena’s “Normal School,” now the Grupo Escolar, and located in the middle of the town; big, white, rectangular, with bright blue doors and window-frames. Juscelino Kubitschek, the present president of Brazil and a former governor of Minas, was born in Diamantina. He had visited recently and a great canvas banner bearing his smiling face almost concealed the front of the building. There are also a Kubitschek Street and a Kubitschek Place with his head in bronze in it, less than life-size, as if done by the Amazonian head-shrinkers.

The market is a large wooden shed, with blue and red arches, and a sparse forest of thin, gnawed hitching-posts around it. The drovers are still there, with loads of hides and corn, but because of trains, better roads, and trucks, trade has dwindled to next to nothing since Helena’s day. Near the Cathedral one is warned from the street or alley where the “bad girls” live. They are extremely juvenile mulattoes, sitting on their doorsteps with their feet stuck out on the cobblestones, gossiping and sucking sugar-cane in the sunshine. The live-forevers that Helena used to pick are still very much in evidence, in fact they are one of the town’s few industries besides diamond-mining. They are a tiny yellow-white straw flower, less than half an inch in diameter, on a long fine shiny brown stalk. Tied up in bunches, the bundle of stems bigger than two hands can hold, they lie drying in rows on the streets all around the Cathedral, and freight-cars full of flowers are sent off every year, on their way to Japan. They are used, I was told, for “fireworks,” or “ammunition,” but I suspect that, dyed and glued, they merely reappear in the backgrounds of Japanese trays, plaques, etc. Brazilian-made fireworks play an important role in Diamantina, as they do in all provincial Brazilian towns, and are used in staggering quantities for religious holidays. I was shown a warehouse packed to the ceiling with firecrackers, catherine-wheels and Roman candles; the supply looked much larger than that of food-stuffs on hand at the same wholesaler’s.

Diamonds and gold, but chiefly diamonds, still obsess the economy. The hotel manager (a new hotel, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, was finished in 1956), using almost the very words that Helena used in 1893, complained that he had to fly in vegetables from Belo Horizonte. “Here no one’s interested in anything but gold and diamonds,” he said. “They say they can’t grow vegetables in this soil, but it isn’t true. They think of nothing but diamonds, diamonds, diamonds.” It is strange to see, on the side of a miserable little house, a blue and white enamelled sign announcing that here is a diamond dealer. I looked inside one of these houses and could see nothing but overhead a lurid plaster statue of St. George killing the dragon, with a small red electric light bulb glowing in front of it, and under it, on the table, a bunch of live-forevers and a fine pair of scales in a glass case. The scales are covered up at night, like the innumerable caged birds hanging everywhere. Curiously shaped stones, lumps of ores, clusters and chunks of rock crystal and quartzes are everywhere, too, used as door-stops and sideboard decorations. In the cold clear air, the town itself, with its neatness, rockiness, and fine glitter, seems almost on the point of precipitation and crystallization.

In the recently opened museum there are the usual polychrome saints and angels, sedan chairs and marriage beds, and then suddenly and horribly an alcove hung with the souvenirs of slavery: rusty chains, hand-cuffs, and leg- and neck-irons draped on the wall; pointed iron prods originally fastened to poles; and worse things. Driving about the region, the sites of the old slave encampments are pointed out. Trees, and a very fine short grass, supposedly from Africa, distinguish them, and they are usually beside a stream and near the pits of old mines. But now there is only the small Negro and mulatto population to show for all the million or more slaves who came here in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

I made an excursion to Boa Vista, where Helena’s father mined. The mines are abandoned now, although they were worked on a large scale by foreign companies up until a few years ago. There is nothing to be seen but an immense excavation exposing soils of different colors (each with a different name; Burton’s book gives an excellent account of them and the different methods of mining), and endless iron pipes. Boa Vista is slightly higher than Diamantina; although it is six or seven miles away one can see a church-tower. The road there is dirt, narrow, winding, and eventually the taxi scrapes over outcroppings of naked rock and splashes through streams. Battalions of grotesque rocks charge across the fields, or stand like architecture, pierced by Gothic-ruin windows. Large slabs balance on top of moldering turrets, with vines, bushes, and even stunted palm-trees on their tops. Helena Morley was not a fanciful child but I wondered at her riding on her borrowed horse, before sun-up, along this nightmare road, hurrying to get back to Diamantina in time for school.

I took with me a life-long friend of Helena’s future husband, Dr. Brant, Senhor Antonio Cicero de Menezes, former local director of the Post Office service, now eighty years old, a very distinguished-looking man with a white Vandyke beard and moustaches, like an older, frailer Joseph Conrad. We came back through the hamlet of twenty or so houses that is Palha (straw) today and Seu Antonio Cicero said, in Helena’s very phrase, “Now let us descend and suck fruit.” So we sat in the tiny general store, surrounded by household and mining necessities: iron kettles and frying pans, salt beef and soap, and sucked a good many slightly sour oranges. A little boy brought them in a gold-panning bowl and Seu Antonio Cicero prepared them for me with his pocket-knife faster than I could suck. The storekeeper showed me a store room full of these wooden bowls, cowhides and tarry lumps of brown sugar and sieves for panning diamonds, piled on the floor, and boxes and boxes of dusty rock crystals, bound, he said, for the United States, for industrial purposes.

Near there we stopped again to watch a group of men looking for diamonds in a stream beside the road. The head of the group had four men, black and white, working for him; he gave me his name and asked me to print it; here it is: Manoel Benicio de Loyola, “diamond-hunter of Curralinho.” They were shovelling in the shallow, sparkling water, damming it up, releasing it, and arranging piles of gravel on the bank. One of them took up a small quantity of gravel in the wide round sieve and held it just beneath the surface of the water, swirling it skilfully around and around. In a few minutes he lifted it out; the gravel was distributed evenly over the sieve in one thin layer. With the gesture of a quick-fingered housewife turning out a cake, he turned the whole thing upside down on the ground, intact. Senhor Benicio de Loyola then put on his horn-rimmed glasses, lowered himself to his knees in the wet mud, and stared, passing a long wooden knife over the gravel from side to side. In a second he waved his hand, got up and put his glasses back in his pocket, and his assistant got ready to turn out another big gravel pancake, while he and Seu Antonio Cicero talked about a large blue diamond someone had found somewhere a day or two before.

This is the simplest of all forms of diamond “mining.” It goes on all around Diamantina constantly, and enough diamonds are found in this way to provide a meagre living for some thousands of people. One sees them, sometimes all alone, sometimes in groups of three or four, standing in every stream. Sometimes they are holding a sieve just under the water, looking for diamonds, sometimes they are sloshing their wooden bowls from side to side in the air, looking for gold. The bent heads and concentration of these figures, in that vast, rock-studded, crucifix-stuck space, give a touch of dementia to the landscape.

I also made an excursion to Biribiri (accented on the second and last “i”s), an enchanting spot, where Helena used to dance, and leap through St. John’s Day bonfires. The factory, for weaving cotton, is still there, but nothing could look less like industrialization. One descends to a fair-sized river and the landscape is green and lush; there are many trees, and fruit trees around the blue- or white-washed stone houses along the one unpaved street. In the middle is the church, better kept up than any of the others I saw, trim, almost dainty. Indeed, it looks like an old-fashioned chocolate box. A blue picket fence encloses the flourishing flower-garden and over the door, below the twin towers, is a large rounded pink Sacred Heart with a crown of realistic ten-inch thorns, green wooden palm branches and blue wooden ribbons. Close around the church stand a dozen real palms, Royal palms, enormously tall and slender, their shining heads waving in the late afternoon sun.

“Helena Morley”

In one of his letters to Robert Bridges, Hopkins says that he has bought some books, among them Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, “a thoroughly good one and all true, but bristling with technicality — seamanship — which I most carefully go over and even enjoy but cannot understand; there are other things, though, as a flogging, which is terrible and instructive and it happened—ah, that is the charm and the main point.” And that, I think, is “the charm and the main point” of Minha Vida de Menina. Its “technicalities,” diamond digging, say, scarcely “bristle,” and its three years in Diamantina are relatively tame and unfocussed, although there are incidents of comparable but casual, small-town cruelty. But—it really happened; everything did take place, day by day, minute by minute, once and only once, just the way Helena says it did. There really was a grandmother, Dona Teodora, a stout, charitable old lady who walked with a cane and managed her family and her freed slaves with an iron will. There really was a Siá Ritinha who stole her neighbors’ chickens, but not Helena’s mother’s chickens; a Father Neves; a spinster English Aunt Madge, bravely keeping up her standards and eking out a living by teaching small obstreperous Negroes, in a town financially ruined by the emancipation of the slaves and the opening of the Kimberley diamond mines.

Some of the people in the diary are still alive, and the successors of those who are dead and gone seem to be cut very much from the same cloth. Little uniformed girls, with perhaps shorter skirts, carrying satchels of books, press their noses against the dining-room windows of the new hotel and are overcome by fits of giggling at seeing the foreigner eat her lunch — on their way to the school run by the Sisters of Charity, the same school that Helena ran away from. The boys still give them the same nicknames. (They call a freckled child of my acquaintance Flocos, “Flakes,” but that is a new word in Brazil and Helena was spared it.) Mota’s store, where she bought her boots, is now Mota’s Son’s store. There is still a garrison of soldiers, now outside the town; there is a seminary, and young priests walk in the streets and people talk to them through the latticed windows.

When the diary happened, Helena was tall and thin and freckled and always, always hungry. She worries about her height, her thinness, her freckles and her appetite. She is not a very good scholar and fails in her first year at Normal School. Her studies can always be interrupted by her brother, her many cousins, or even the lack of a candle. (The diary was mostly written by candlelight.) She is greedy; sometimes she is unfair to her long-suffering sister, Luizinha, but feels properly guilty afterwards, rationalize as she may. She is obviously something of a show-off and saucy to her teachers; but she is outspoken and good-natured and gay, and wherever she is her friends may be getting into mischief but they are having a good time; and she has many friends, old and young, black and white. She is willing to tell stories on herself, although sometimes she tries to ease her conscience, that has “a nail in it.” She thinks about clothes a great deal, but, under the circumstances — she has only two or three dresses and two pairs of boots — who wouldn’t?

She may grow tedious on the subject of stealing fruit, but it is, after all, the original sin, and remember St. Augustine on the subject of the pear tree. On the other hand, she seems to take the Anglo-Saxon sin of sins, “cheating,” rather lightly. If she is not always quite admirable, she is always completely herself; hypocrisy appears for a moment and then vanishes like the dew. Her method of composition seems influenced by the La Fontaine she hates to study; she winds up her stories with a neat moral that doesn’t apply too exactly; sometimes, for variety’s sake, she starts off with the moral instead. She has a sense of the right quotation, or detail, the gag-line, and where to stop. The characters are skilfully differentiated: the quiet, humorous father, the devout, doting, slightly foolish mother, the rigid Uncle Conrado. Occasionally she has “runs” on one subject; perhaps “papa” had admired a particular page and so she wrote a sequel to it or remembered a similar story.

In matters of religion, Helena seems to have been somewhat of an eighteenth-century rationalist. She steps easily in and out of superstition, reason, belief and disbelief, without much adolescent worrying. She would never for a moment doubt, one feels, that the church is “a good thing.” With all its holidays, processions, mast-raisings, and fireworks, its christenings, first communions and funerals, it is the fountain-head of the town’s social life. Her father remains in the background, smiling but tolerant, while her mother pleads with him to go to church and constantly prays for all the family. Like him, Helena is at first skeptical of a schoolmate who dies and acquires a reputation for working miracles; then she veers towards her mother’s party. Her religion, like her feeling for nature, is on the practical side.

She lives in a world of bitter poverty and isolation. A trip to the capital, Rio de Janeiro, where a few boys go to study, takes ten days: eight on mule-back to Sabará, and from there two days by very slow train to Rio. Supplies are brought to town by the drovers, on long lines of mules or horses. One of the greatest problems is what to do with the freed slaves who have stayed on. Reading this diary, one sometimes gets the impression that the greater part of the town, black and white, “rich” and poor, when it hasn’t found a diamond lately, gets along by making sweets and pastries, brooms and cigarettes and selling them to each other. Or the freed slaves are kept busy manufacturing them in the kitchen and peddling them in the streets, and the lady of the house collects the profits — or buys, in her parlor, the products of her kitchen.

Now that I can join in my friends’ exchanges of anecdotes from the book, and have seen Diamantina, I think that one of my own favorite entries is Helena’s soliloquy on November 5th, 1893, on the meaning of Time (her style improves in the later years):

“The rooster’s crow never gives the right time and nobody believes it. When a rooster crows at nine o’clock they say that a girl is running away from home to get married. I’m always hearing the rooster crow at nine o’clock, but it’s very rarely that a girl runs away from home.

“Once upon a time I used to believe that roosters told the time, because in Boa Vista when you ask a miner the time he looks at the sun and tells you. If you go and look at the clock, he’s right. So I used to think that the sun kept time during the day and the rooster at night. Now I realize that this was a mistake.…

“In Cavalhada only the men have watches. Those who live in the middle of the town don’t feel the lack of them because almost all the churches have clocks in their towers. But when papa isn’t home the mistakes we make about the hours are really funny.… The rooster is mama’s watch, which doesn’t run very well. It’s already fooled us several times.” She goes on to tell about “mama’s” waking her and Luizinha up to go to four o’clock Mass, because the rooster has already crowed twice. They drink their coffee and start out. “I kept looking at the moon and the stars and saying to mama, ‘This time the Senhora’s going to see whether the rooster can tell time or not.’ The street was deserted. The two of us walked holding onto mama’s arms. When we passed by the barracks the soldier on duty looked at mama and asked, ‘What’s the Senhora doing in the street with these little girls at this hour?’ Mama said, ‘We’re going to Mass at the Cathedral.’ The soldier said, ‘Mass at midnight? It isn’t Christmas eve. What’s this all about?’

“I was afraid of the soldier. Mama said, ‘Midnight? I thought it was four o’clock. Thank you very much for the information.’

“We went home and lay down in our clothes. But even so we missed Mass. When we got to church later Father Neves was already in the Hail Marys.”

I like to think of the two tall, thin little girls hanging onto their mother’s arms, the three figures stumbling up the steep streets of the rocky, lightless little town beneath the cold bright moon and stars; and I can hear the surprised young soldier’s voice, mama’s polite reply, and then three pairs of footsteps scuttling home again over the cobblestones.

Food

The staple diet of Brazil consists of dried black beans and rice, with whatever meat, beef or pork, salted or fresh, can be afforded or obtained. And black beans, instead of the “bread” of other countries, seem to be equated with life itself. An example of this: when the Brazilian football team went to play in the Olympic Games recently, thirty-three pounds of black beans were taken along for each man. And recently in Rio the court ordered a taxi-driver to pay alimony to his wife and children in the form of twenty-two pounds of rice and twenty-two pounds of black beans monthly.

They are boiled separately and seasoned with salt and pepper, garlic, and lard. The common vegetables, such as pumpkin, okra, couve (a kind of cabbage), are usually made into stews with small quantities of meat or chicken. As in other Catholic countries, salt codfish is a common dish. But black beans and rice form the basis of the main meal, the heavy lunch, usually served early, between eleven and half-past twelve. At the time of the diary lunch was even earlier, at half-past ten or eleven, and dinner was eaten at three or four o’clock. This explains why everyone is always ready to eat again in the evenings.

A dish of roasted manioc flour is always served with the beans and rice, indeed it is what the unqualified word “flour” signifies. It is sprinkled over the food, to thicken the sauce, and perhaps to add a little textural interest to the monotonous diet, since its nutritional value is almost nothing. It is also used in making various cakes and pastries. There is an impressive variety of these in Brazil, using manioc and cornmeal as well as wheat flours, coconut, brown sugar, etc., each with its own name, frequently religious in origin and varying from region to region. Helena mentions a dozen or more and there are whole books on the subject. Desserts are often pudims, usually, or unusually, heavy, and a great variety of fruit pastes, guava, quince, banana, etc., served with a small piece of hard white cheese. On a good Brazilian table, desserts appear, or always used to, several at a time. Cinnamon is the universal spice. Most Brazilians have very sweet tooths.

Breakfast is simply coffee, black or with boiled milk, and a piece of bread, although Helena varies hers strangely with cucumbers. Coffee is served after the other meals, at intervals in the day, and inevitably to callers at any time, in the form of cafezinhos, “little coffees,” black, boiling hot, and with the tiny cup half-filled with sugar. (The sugar is only partially refined so it takes quite a lot to sweeten a cup.) It is made by stirring the very finely ground coffee into boiling water, then pouring it through a coffee bag. These brown-stained bags and their high wooden stands are a symbol of Brazil, like black beans, and they are seen everywhere, even in miniature, as toys. There are laws to ensure that the coffee served in the innumerable cafés is unadulterated and of the required strength. (In an American movie being shown in Rio a character was told that he’d feel better after he had “a good breakfast, porridge and bacon and eggs and coffee,” and this speech was rendered by the Portuguese sub-title, “Come and take coffee.”)

A glance at the photographs will perhaps explain what may seem like Helena’s over-emphasis on fruit, or unnatural craving for it. Through June, July, and August, the long dry winters in that stony region, when everything is covered with red dust, with a constant shortage of fresh vegetables and the only drinking water running in open gutters as it was at that time, “sucking oranges” must have been the best way to quench one’s thirst, and stealing fruit an almost irresistible impulse.

Money

Dr. Brant has given me the following information about the value of money at the time the diary was kept.

The mil reis (a thousand reis, the plural of real, or “royal”) was worth twenty cents of U.S. money. (As a banker, Dr. Brant points out that the dollar has since been devalued, so that a mil reis would be worth ten cents of today’s money. But as Helena says, we are speaking of “bygone days” and it seems simpler to keep it at the earlier evaluation.) Five mil reis would therefore be a dollar, 100 reis two pennies, and so on. Dr. Brant gives a list of approximate prices of goods and labor at the time:

A pound of meat: 10¢

A pound of sugar: 3¢

A dozen eggs: 4¢

A quart of milk: 4¢

A pound of butter: 12¢

A pair of shoes: $3.00

A good horse: $20.00

Average rent for a good house: $8.00 a month

A cook: $2.00 a month

Wages of Negroes employed in mining: 40¢ a day (paid to the whites who rented them out. In the town, or in agriculture, Negro wages were less.)

Arinda receives about $100 for the diamond she finds, page 6, Helena makes $6.00 by selling her mother’s gold brooch without a diamond in it, page 172 ff.; and the grandmother sends home a present of $10.00 to her daughter, on page 48, etc.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many friends and acquaintances for the help they have given me, both as sources of information about Diamantina and its life and vocabulary, and with the actual work of translation. Thanks are due:

In Diamantina, to Antonio Cicero de Menezes and his granddaughter; to Armando Assis, manager of the Hotel de Tourismo; and to many other inhabitants who showed me the way or went with me, invited me into their houses, and patiently repeated and spelled out the names of things.

To Vera Pacheco Jordão, who went with me to Diamantina and came to my assistance when my Portuguese failed me; to Manuel Bandeira; to Dora Romariz; to Otto Schwartz; and to Mary Stearns Morse, who typed the difficult manuscript.

To Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, head of the Patrimonio Artistico of the Brazilian Department of Education, who took an interest in the book and who got out the Department’s collection of photographs of Diamantina for me to choose from.

To my friend Pearl Kazin, who, in New York, received the manuscript and gave me invaluable help with it.

To my friend Lota de Macedo Soares, who reluctantly but conscientiously went over every word of the translation with me, not once, but several times.

To Dr. Augusto Mario Caldeira Brant, who also went over every word of the translation, and without whose remarkable memory for the customs and idioms of Diamantina in the ’90’s a great deal of detail might have been lost. I am grateful to him for many suggestions, and many of the footnotes are his.

But most thanks of all are, of course, due to Dona Alice herself for her wonderful gift: the book that has kept her childhood for us, as fresh as paint. Long may she live to re-tell the stories of “Helena Morley” to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Sítio da Alcobacinha

Petrópolis

September 1956

A New Capital, Aldous Huxley, and Some Indians

When Aldous Huxley and his wife visited Brasil recently, the Cultural Division of Itamarati, the Brasilian Department of Foreign Affairs, arranged for them to make a trip to Brasília, the new capital of the country, with an additional trip farther into the interior to see the Uialapiti Indians. The Department of Foreign Affairs is always referred to as Itamariti because it is housed in the former home of the Barons of Itamariti in Rio de Janeiro, a handsome, solid residence, really a palace on a small scale. Behind its high walls, surrounded by magnificent Imperial Palms, are a garden and a formal pool complete with swans, where diplomatic dinner-parties are held.

The Brasilian nobility created by the first and second Emperors were fiercely nationalistic and proud of their semi-civilized country, and for their titles they invariably chose Indian place-names, such as Itaboraí, Tamandaré, or Itamarati. One could graph modern Brasilian history very patly on the three points connected by the Huxley trip: by way of Itamarati to the safe, democratic insipidity of the name “Brasília,” and then beyond, to the dwindling tribes along the Xingu River, Indian again, for here as in the United States, many geographical names have held to their originals, or approximations of them.

Ten people went on the trip: Huxley and his Italian wife; two men from Itamarati, one the head of the Cultural Division, José Meira Penna; Antônio Callado, editor-in-chief of the biggest Rio morning paper, and his English wife; a Polish-Brasilian girl who practices architecture in Rio; a young Englishman from the British Embassy; a girl who had been acting as the Huxleys’ interpreter in Rio; and myself, the only American. They were all to fly to Brasília from the state of Minas Gerais where the Huxleys had been taken to see a colonial town or two, and I was to meet them there for lunch, on a Saturday at the big new Oscar Niemeyer hotel.

Brasília is about six hundred miles northwest of Rio, in the state of Goiás; at present the railroad nearest to it ends at Annapolis, a small town eighty-five miles away. It takes three days, and trains on both regular gauge and narrow gauge tracks, to reach Annapolis from Rio; from there trucks and jeeps can go on to Brasília. So far only two trainloads of material for the new capital have managed to make the trip that way; all the rest — the staggering quantities of cement, bricks, steel, glass and wood necessary to start building a modern city — have gone by road, by bad roads — everything, that is, that has not been flown in by plane. Since gasoline is the biggest item of importation in Brasil, accounting for some 24 per cent of its dollar expenditure, this attempt to build a city before building a railroad to its site is one of the most serious criticisms of President Juscelino Kubitschek’s new capital.

The change of capital was written into the Brasilian Constitution as far back as 1891, and it had been talked of as early as 1820. Among the reasons originally given for the change one was that Rio de Janeiro, being on the coast, was open to attack from the sea; a capital farther to the west would open up the vast uninhabited stretches of the interior to permanent settlers as no pioneering had (or has) been able to do. The first reason, of course, disappeared with the coming of the air age, but the second is still the chief argument of the pro-Brasília group. There are others, some rather similar to those for the establishment of Washington: legislation, the pro-Brasílias say, will be carried on more efficiently and fairly away from the pressures of the rival cities of Rio and São Paulo; and if the capital is simply the seat of government, senators and deputies will go there to conduct the nation’s business and then return to their own states, rather than be seduced by the attractions of Rio, living there for years at a time and seeing their constituents rarely, if at all, as many of them do now. Also, Rio is badly overcrowded, constantly short of water, and its slums are mushrooming as more and more miserable immigrants trek in from the poorer or drought-stricken areas in search of work. Many of these, the argument goes, will now be drawn to Brasília; and it is true that some thousands of them have already gone there.

While everyone in Brasil who has ever thought about it at all agrees that the interior of the country has to be opened up somehow or other, and the sooner the better, those opposed to Brasília feel that it might be done to begin with more modestly and economically, and by means more in keeping with Brasil’s present desperate financial state. Brasil needs schools, roads, and railroads, above all; then medical care, improved methods of agriculture, and dams and electric power, particularly in the drought-ridden northeast. These things, they feel, should be tackled more energetically and systematically, if necessarily slowly, before undertaking to build a luxury capital, an extravagant show-place, three hours by plane from the fringe of cities along the sea-board. The founding of small towns and villages in the interior, and help with their industries and agriculture — especially by means of railroads and better roads, since at present 50 per cent of all produce spoils before it even reaches the markets — this, the anti-Brasílias say, is what would really open up the interior, and not a new capital. And why build a new capital, they ask, when, even if it may need a thorough overhauling at the moment, they already have one of the most beautiful capitals in the world, complete with government buildings? They think it will be years before the foreign embassies build there, although they have all bought land as a matter of course or of policy, and even longer before the senators and deputies can be persuaded to stay in Brasília for any length of time.

Whoever may be right time will tell, but Brasília is President Kubitschek’s dream. He announced that eventually someone would have to keep the promise made the country in the Constitution in 1891, and he is going to keep it now. His five-year term has two more years to run; on April twenty-first, 1960, the government is supposed to make the great move.

* * *

I arrived there alone on a Friday afternoon clutching a piece of paper bearing the name of the man, a relative of someone important, who was supposed to meet me but never did. The first thing that greeted my eyes as I got off the plane was a three-throned shoe-shine stand against the wall of the small airport building. At the moment I was not in need of a shoe-shine but all departing passengers certainly were. To be sure, it was the tail-end of the dry season, but in the later summer of 1958 one’s first and last impression of Brasília was of miles and miles and miles of blowing red dust.

Inside, the airport is a fair sample of the workaday atmosphere of the greater part of Brasília so far — rather like that of a small bus-station in the United States, a far-west bus station. Men in jeans, wide-brimmed felt hats and high boots, mill about drinking coffee and beer and eating stale pastries. (Women are still scarce in Brasília and I had been the only one on the plane.) There is a small general-store section of battered cans of milk, sardines, and hearts of palm, ropes of dry red sausage, bottles of cachaça, sunglasses, headache remedies, and yesterday’s newspapers. On the wall is a line of little silk banners bearing the magic word BRASÍLIA, and also for sale are plastic plaques embossed in gold with the same word and, in profile, the head from which all this has sprung: Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, in a blur of gold.

The four or five men, looking like engineers — one had a big T-square under his arm — who had arrived with me all got into jeeps and were driven off in clouds of dust. Finally I gave up waiting for my mentor and took the cream-colored Volkswagen Microbus lettered “Brasília Palace Hotel” and was driven off, too, the only passenger. It is over twelve miles from the airport to the hotel; it was a warm, clear day and we drove very fast over the bumpy dirt road.

The site of Brasília is an empty, barren, slightly rolling plateau, four thousand feet above sea-level. The place had been described to me, but I was not prepared for quite such dreariness and desolation: compared with almost any other inhabitable part of this fantastically beautiful country it seems really remarkably unattractive and unpromising. There are no mountains nor even real hills, no rivers, at least not in evidence (there is a small one some miles away and two small streams), no trees of any size, no feeling of height, nor grandeur, nor security, nor fertility, nor even just picturesqueness; not one of the qualities one thinks of as capable of giving a city charm or character. It reminded me, and other members of the party later said it reminded them, of the depressing landscape around Madrid. The two gifts Mother Nature seems to have bestowed on Brasília so far are sky and space, and when one imagines these endless swelling plains covered over with modern white government buildings, monuments, skyscrapers, shops, and apartment houses, the way they are eventually supposed to be, the only natural beauty left it is the sky. Of course there is now to be an artificial lake; there is even a yacht club marked on the map of the city; and friends who have been there in the rainy season say that it is very beautiful to see the rain-storms coming across the plains, from miles away. But for anyone accustomed to the hyper-glamorous beauty of Rio de Janeiro, where miles of white beaches, or even a view of the bay at the end of a city street, can make up for most of the city’s shortcomings, Brasília seems like a sad come-down.

There are a few clumps of palms here and there, but in general the vegetation consists of sparse, scrubby trees, mostly a variety known as “apricot,” which bears small wild fruits, no relation, however, to the true apricot. As far off the road as the eye can see these trees and the coarse grass are coated with the red dust constantly stirred up by passing trucks. Growing out of almost every thin trunk, half-way up, hideous and bigger than a man’s head, is a white ants’, or termites’ nest. When I asked my driver, a depressed, dust-covered young man, about them he said dryly that termites build half-way up the trees to be that much nearer the fruit. Miles apart, a few clusters of roofs can be seen, colonies of the construction workers and other new inhabitants. By far the biggest of these is the “Nucleus of Pioneers,” or “Flagbearers,” to translate its romantic name literally, commonly called simply the Free City. This was officially opened in February 1957, with four hundred people, and now has, incredibly and encouragingly, forty-five thousand. “All built of wood,” said the driver, and we heard that phrase many times because in a Latin country of stone, marble, tiles, and plaster, a whole city deliberately built of wood is a curiosity. “And it certainly is free,” he added, and that was his last remark until we reached the hotel.

Oscar Niemeyer, world-famous architect, has been a friend of President Kubitschek ever since building a house for him, the first modern house in Belo Horizonte, when Kubitschek was mayor of that city. Later, when Kubitschek was governor of the state of Minas Gerais, he commissioned Niemeyer to build the resort of Pampulha, just outside Belo Horizonte, which is the state’s capital. Now Niemeyer is responsible for all public buildings to be built in Brasília. In 1956 a competition was held for a “pilot-plan” for the new city of five hundred thousand people. It was any architect’s dream come true, and dozens of plans were submitted, some extremely elaborate and detailed, down to suburbs and agricultural belts. Lucio Costa, Brasil’s leading older architect and a friend and sponsor of Niemeyer since his student days, felt that at that early stage nothing very detailed should be attempted. He submitted only five or six little sketches, drawn rapidly, apparently, on small sheets of an inferior grade of paper. But his pilot-plan was immediately recognized as a brilliant little tour de force, and it was unanimously awarded the first prize, equal to about fourteen thousand dollars.

Following it, the city is laid out in the form of an aeroplane, or is it a bird, heading east, with a body seven or eight miles long. The wings, seven and a half miles across, will be the residential districts; the shopping center is at the tail; the body contains banks and office-buildings; along about the thorax come the foreign ministries, and the head is the “Esplanade of the Three Powers”: Judiciary, Administrative, and Executive — this last being, on paper, Niemeyer’s most spectacular and ambitious project to date. Set apart from the aeroplane or bird, to the east of its head, are the Brasília Palace Hotel and the Palácio da Alvorada (or “Palace of the Dawn”), the presidential residence, the only two large buildings completed at present; indeed, except for one small church and the foundations or skeletons of five blocks of apartment houses, they are almost the only permanent buildings to be seen.

For a recent number of Modulo, the Brasilian architectural magazine, Niemeyer wrote an article called “Testimony,” lofty in tone but uneasy as to logic, about his work for Brasília. Politically he is a communist and in his “testimony” he takes himself to task for his past errors and promises to do better in the future, in the best communist manner. He says he still believes “that until there is a just distribution of wealth — which can reach all sectors of the population — the basic objective of architecture, that is, its social foundation, will be sacrificed, and the role of architect will be relegated to waiting upon the whims of the wealthy classes.” He confesses to having done this in the past, to having thought of architecture as a “game” and even having deliberately built houses with eccentricities and extravagances for their rich owners “to talk about.” But from now on, he says, things will be different; he intends that his works for Brasília shall all be “useful and permanent and capable of evoking a little beauty and emotion.”

It might strike a critical visitor as ironical that for over two years thousands of workers have been left to build wooden houses or shacks and shift for themselves, while the first two buildings to be completed should both be called “Palace.” However, to be fair, besides the Free City, attempts are being made to provide decent housing for workers and white-collar workers. Two blocks of five hundred houses each, “row” houses, designed by Niemeyer, have already been built by the Fundação da Casa Popular, and five “superblocks” of apartments are now going up, financed by five of the Brasilian institutos, a form of syndicate peculiar to Brasil, handling pensions, hospitalization, or loans, or functioning, as in this case, as banks.

At the end of four years, when enough housing will have been completed, the Free City is supposed to be razed; in fact, by then, one branch of the artificial lake is supposed to be rippling above its streets. Those most violently opposed to Brasília cynically predict that the Free City will never be razed; that it will remain and probably grow, the slums of the future city, like the wild and uncontrollable growth of shacks that now surrounds Rio de Janeiro.

(Also to be fair it should be explained that although the word “palace” for a president’s residence may sound strange to American ears, in Latin countries the word does not have the overtones of royalty it has for us. It can mean merely “mansion,” and palacete, “small palace,” is often used for any large house.)

Surely it is to Kubitschek’s credit that he has probably the most sophisticated taste in architecture of any head of any government. Educated Brasilians are apt to feel that although their country is in a bad transitional period, backwards in many respects, and may not have made much of a stir in the other arts, it has reason to be proud of its contemporary architecture. The outstandingly beautiful Ministry of Education building in Rio was begun in 1937, the very first and still one of the very few government buildings to be commissioned in modern international style. (Chandigarh was not begun until almost fifteen years later.) After all, Kubitschek could have chosen to build an Old Colonial capital, or a Greek-and-Roman, or even one in a particularly monstrous Swiss-chalet style that has sometimes been thought appropriate for Brasil. But as far as his choice of style goes the only objections I have heard of have been from the Army, which does not feel that an airy, glassy, or floating edifice will represent its view of things. But perhaps all generals secretly yearn for crenellations and drawbridges.

* * *

A friend of mine, a Rio interior decorator who had just finished doing up the new hotel, had made reservations for me by two-way radio. The Brasília Palace Hotel is in one block, a hundred and thirty-five rooms, one room thick and three stories high; only a small central section rests on the ground, the rest of the building on either side being supported by concrete pillars covered with black-anodized aluminum. At night these pillars almost disappear and the hotel appears to float like a luxury-liner, an effect that seems to be dear to Niemeyer’s heart these days.

The entrance, reminding me vaguely of a New York subway entrance, is down a flight of steps into a sunken lobby; over it, at ground level, is a large, pleasant lounge, full of Saarinen chairs and marble-topped coffee-tables. The three floors of rooms face east to the Palace of the Dawn; three corridors run the full length of the west side of the building. There is one public staircase, about four feet wide, and two small elevators (one was not working when we were there), each holding at the most six people, so that there will certainly be serious traffic problems when the hotel is filled with its quota of three hundred guests. The entire west wall is made of large blocks of cement, five inches or so thick, and regularly set into each block are rows of little round glasses — real drinking glasses, the bell boys like to inform one — their circle-ridged bottoms sealing the wall on the outside. They let in the light in thousands of spots on the walls and gray carpeting of the corridors, an effect that is extremely pretty but unfortunately, from the moment the sun starts down the western sky until early next morning, fiendishly hot. Also, I wondered how could the insides of all those little glasses ever be cleaned? Already the more casual type of guest had begun to leave cigarette butts and other odds and ends in those within reach. Between each floor a row of blocks has been left without the glasses; the holes open into an airspace above the halls, where small screened openings alternate with light fixtures along the ceilings. This is supposed to provide ventilation, but not a breath of air came from the vents, and at night, when I walked the corridor to my room at the very end, before reaching its white formica doorway I would be dizzy from the heat. The bathroom ceilings are pierced with holes into this common airspace, too, with the unhappy result that one clearly hears the man next door taking his bath, limb by limb. The rooms, however, are large and cool, and except for the dressing-tables, well furnished. In the dressing-table mirrors a woman of barely average height (myself) sees only her chin.

Between the hotel block and the dining-room wing is a small space about as big as a tennis court and here grass had been planted and was being watered. Otherwise, in front and in back of the hotel, and for the half-mile tract between it and the presidential palace, the red dust blew unchecked. (A week or so after this, when President Gronchi of Italy visited Brasília, a thin layer of cement was poured over the area in front of the Palace.) Dust seeped into the hotel, tingeing the carpets and one’s clothing and the gray marble floor of the lounge was powdered with it. I watched a workman trying to clean this floor with an electric polishing machine. After producing a few big spirals edged with banks of red dust, he gave up the attempt.

This particular floor comes to an end in a free-form curve four feet higher than the floor of the dining-room, into which the lounge opens. Plants and cacti hide coyly beneath the overhang, invisible from the lounge. The one occasion on our trip when I saw Aldous Huxley openly irritated was when, just after he arrived the next day, he started walking down the lounge, against the light, and almost fell over this drop. He showed distinct signs of anger, for him, and remarked that the handrail had been in use for some thousands of years and it seemed “a shame to abandon such a useful invention.”

In front of the dining-room is the biggest swimming-pool I have ever seen: oval, lined with blue tiles, as yet waterless. The Presidential pool, at the far side of the Palace, is bigger than the standard Olympic pool, and this is a much bigger one than that. Permanent quarters for the hotel employees have not yet been built. Beyond the pool is a wooden paling, and inside it a collection of wooden shacks. Maids, bell boys, and chefs in their white hats, skirt the blue tile abyss and vanish into this shabby compound, and the dining-room looks out on it.

Concealed behind a curving black wall on the dining-room level are a bar and cocktail lounge, and also there was the source of some annoyance to the Huxley party — a loud, Brasilian equivalent of Muzak, which was turned on for two hours at lunch and dinner. The food was not bad, considering that all supplies have to be brought by truck or by plane from at least as far away as Annapolis; there were almost no vegetables, but always airlifted pineapples or papayas to provide us with vitamins, as well as the mushy Delicious apple, as ubiquitous here as in the United States.

That Friday night two far-off couples and I dined all alone in the big dining-room, the canned music struck up with the canned consommé, and the extra waiters looked on. After dinner two younger couples appeared in the lounge, with a baby in a basket and another small child to each couple. One mother in plaid slacks ran races with her little boy; the other joggled her baby’s basket with her foot and read a detective story.

* * *

This peaceful family life, without the fathers, went on all the next morning. Around noon, when I was expecting my own party to arrive, several cars drove up rapidly from the direction of the airport and at least forty fashionably dressed men and women poured noisily down the steps into the subterranean lobby. They had come by special plane from São Paulo to attend a banquet and a ball that President Kubitschek was giving for them at the hotel that evening. The almost deserted, oddly domestic lounge suddenly swarmed with bejeweled women in sack dresses and men in pin-stripe suits. Parties like this, I was told, take place every week-end; in an air-age version of the hospitable old Brasilian custom of “showing the house to the visitors,” Kubitschek invites groups from Rio, São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and other cities. Once, even, a whole convent of young girls came by special plane to look things over at the President’s invitation. Tales of these week-end parties, of course, only increase the indignation of those opposed to Brasília on economic grounds — besides the expenses of entertainment, they say, just that much more gasoline is being used, in addition to the thousands of gallons burnt up by the trucks and planes bringing in building materials.

Five or ten minutes later the Huxleys and their party did arrive: very quiet, carrying books and cameras, and, slightly travel-worn, but looking alert and curious compared to the giddier set still swarming around the room-clerks. Laura Huxley and Maya Osser, the Polish-Brasilian architect, are old friends of mine, and I knew most of the others slightly or had met them.

Huxley is, of course, tall, pale, and thin, but he undoubtedly looks even taller, paler, and thinner than usual in Brasil, where most men, at least by Anglo-Saxon standards, are short and dark. Also, while the Brasilians were thinking of the season still as “winter” and in spite of the temperature were wearing dark suits and ties, Huxley always wore beige or light gray suits, or a white sports jacket, and he favored an extremely long, pale, satin necktie with Persian horsemen on it. His long hair, combed straight back, is a uniform gray-brown, his features large but well-modelled; he has beautiful teeth. Laura Huxley is about twenty years younger than her husband, small, trim, and blonde, with a rather large head and enormous gray-green eyes set far apart, in a remarkable Campigli-like style of Italian good looks. She is polite and friendly and animated, in French, Italian, or English, as the need arises. She shares Huxley’s passionate interest in medicines, mescalin, and subliminal advertising, but on a more personal and practical level; in fact she adores to doctor people and occasionally handed out her various special pills to one or the other of us. With Huxley, it is hard to tell how much he is seeing, and since he usually talks very little, what he is thinking. By long self-discipline an original cool, English detachment seems to have been overlaid with an Oriental, or simply mystical, non-attachment. There is a slight cast to his bad eye, and this characteristic, which I always find oddly attractive, in Huxley’s case adds even more to his veiled and other-worldly gaze. When examining something close to, a photograph or a painting, he sometimes takes out a small horn-rimmed magnifying glass, or, for distant objects, a miniature telescope, and he often sits resting his good eye by cupping his hand over it. He is unfailingly patient, never seems to tire (whenever anyone grew apprehensive about this his wife assured us that he never does tire), and smiling sweetly, displays occasional mild outbursts of interest. But he gives the impression of being inwardly absorbed in a meditation of his own, far removed from the possibly frivolous scenes of man’s efforts that the Brasilian and Department of Foreign Affairs was proffering, and we all, to degrees that varied with our temperaments, behaved with him slightly like nervous hostesses.

After lunch and a two hours’ rest we were taken off on a brief tour of the sights of Brasília, starting with the Palace of the Dawn. Kubitschek, meanwhile, had arrived for the party by his private Viscount. He sent over the old Lincoln convertible he keeps in Brasília, for the guests of honor. The Callados went with them; the rest of us climbed into the cream-colored Microbus and tagged along behind. Around the Palace is a barbed-wire fence and at the gate are a sentry box and two soldiers in tin helmets with tommy-guns under their arms. The Presidential car swept through the open gate but the sentries, not having been notified about the other car, refused to let us in and shut the gate under the bus’s nose. The driver tried to explain but the young soldier said “No, no!” firmly and finally rather crossly, hugging his gun. The young Englishman hopped down from the bus and exclaimed “This is outrageous!” in the traditional English manner. Then someone drove back to the hotel, brought back the password, or at least permission for us to enter, and we were admitted after all, to catch up with the others.

The Palace of the Dawn is a large, rectangular, greenish (because Ray-Ban) glass box, framed lengthwise by swooping, off-white, pillars, ten on the far side in an unbroken series, and eight on the front, allowing a space for the entrance. From the outside it is certainly one of the most beautiful of all Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings. The pillars, in particular, are an architectural triumph: it is, after all, no mean feat to invent a new “order.” If one imagines a chain of huge white kites, poised upside down, then grasped by giant hands and squeezed in on the four sides until they are elegantly attenuated, one can picture them fairly accurately. They are covered with slabs of a crystalline Brasilian marble, and their bases, that is, the heads of the upside-down kites, theoretically narrow to point zero, and actually the part resting on the ground is only about six inches wide. In his Modulo article Niemeyer says that by means of these delicate dimensions he hoped to give the Palace “lightness and dignity — as if it had just landed gently on the earth.” And in this he has succeeded completely, even if the other-planet atmosphere of all Brasília just now comes to his assistance — the incongruous soldiers, the strange, clumsy hotel, the hit-or-miss shacks and palm-trees, might all have “just landed,” too — the effect of the Palace is completely original and yet immediately acceptable as a masterpiece of lightness and grace.

These pillars fascinated us all; they were patted and photographed and discussed for some time, Huxley and others even climbing down from the long porches to look at them from underneath. (They have quickly become a symbol for Brasília, appearing over and over in magazines and newspapers, as well as on the little silk banners, the hotel writing-paper and black imitation-leather zipper bags given to the guests.)

On either side of the entrance are square shallow pools of the same marble as the pillars; one contains a bronze statue of two female figures pierced with holes, by the Brasilian sculptor, Ceschiatti, the other a thin slab, like a sign-post, bearing an inscription in bronze. Also in front of the Palace we were shown a magnolia tree, about a yard high, that had been planted by Secretary Dulles just a few days before. (About a week later President Gronchi planted an Italian cypress in Brasília. There had been plans for Imperial palms grouped near the Palace but lately the variety of palm has been changed to the regional buriti, not so tall nor so elegant, but a very presentable tree, nevertheless.) The porch or gallery of the Palace extends beyond it on the left side, then curls around on itself and upwards in a small, exuberant, if snail-like chapel — a sort of airy, Latin, wave-of-the-hand concluding gesture to the static dance of the linked pillars. At least that is the idea; the chapel struck most of us as out of scale, perhaps a shade too small for the pillars. Its snail-with-a-sail facade is topped by a slender brass cross that looks exactly right, but the small window cut through the marble below it, a square hole opening onto space, seems a bit theatrical, even if it is strongly reminiscent of the small windows of the early mission churches in Brasil.

Once inside the Palace, I am sorry to say, the effect of coolness and airy grace vanishes. The decorating was done by Niemeyer and his daughter; the colors are frequently harsh and the furniture seems meagre and badly arranged — but surely many additions and changes will be made. We stepped in onto hot turkey-red carpets, extra-thick (“Nylon foam?” someone tentatively asked the secretary who was showing us around), laid down between walls of mirror and glittering gold tile. A rail-less, red-carpeted ramp (we were told that Secretary Dulles had almost fallen off that) goes up to the right, to the Salão Nobre. Here are a grand piano and a few groups of sofas, and upholstered and brass-and-leather chairs, some of which, at first glance, looked like the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair but which, as one discovers on trying them, are a smaller and not too comfortable copy of it.

Perhaps it should be said that Brasil, like Italy, Spain, or Portugal, has never had our northern ideas of comfort in the home. Until recently all beds were very hard, sometimes even of leather or cane, because hard beds are cooler in a hot climate; floors were of stone or tile or bare jacaranda planks; and chairs and sofas, when copied from foreign designs, often used woven cane instead of stuffed upholstery. The thick walls, extremely high ceilings, and small shuttered windows of colonial days were cool and appropriate; the “modern” interior, with its frequently soft and low furniture, light colors, and great areas of glass, has really not been completely adapted (as yet) to the Brasilian climate.

Perhaps we were too harsh in our criticisms as we trooped from room to room; I think that only Huxley failed to comment on the heat and glare. Across either end of the glass box that makes up the Palace is a long room, each with chairs and long table. One is the formal dining room, the other the Dispatch Room. Both are curtained only at the sides, that is, the ends of the box, and the afternoon sun pours into them through the glass front of the building; the wood of the tables was already crackling. The inner walls are panelled with large squares of deeply corrugated jacaranda, Brasil’s handsomest wood. On the upper, shaded parts of the walls the effect is very beautiful, almost like tortoise-shell, but lower down, where the sun strikes, it, too, looks dried and lusterless. Perspiring and occasionally dropping onto the nearest chairs, we rudely asked our guide about air-conditioning, but he replied that it wasn’t necessary.

A floating staircase goes straight from the Salão Nobre and is also carpeted in thick turkey-red. Upstairs, the halls are panelled in delicate tan “Ivory Wood,” or satin wood. We saw only one bedroom, looking like any twin-bedded, chintz-hung guest room, but its adjoining bath was truly magnificent in chromium and thick gray marble, with a square sunken bath sloping from the ends to the middle, like a sagging double bed. Under the bedroom windows, overlooking the swimming-pool, runs a shaded balcony of highly polished slabs of rich green marble, a beautiful material but surely out of keeping with the building’s light structure and the over-delicate panelling just inside.

At present the Palace walls are almost bare; downstairs are two tapestries and a few small paintings by Emilio Di Cavalcanti. This austerity and lack of ornament reminded Huxley of a very different tour he had once made through Buckingham Palace, where every inch of wall space is covered with paintings, and every table loaded with photographs commemorating incidents in the lives of the royal family. We gathered around him in the heat of the upstairs hall while he talked for quite a while, and very entertainingly, about George V’s bedroom arrangements.

Outside, workmen were laying turquoise blue tiles in the cavernous swimming-pool while three or four soldiers with their tommy-guns peered over at them — out of curiosity, boredom, or perhaps it was their duty. In the middle of the pool is a high, jagged imitation rock or island, the top of which is supposed to be planted with a garden — at an acute angle. However, I was later told that Niemeyer is not pleased with this “modern” but curiously Gothic-revival detail and may change it.

To the right are the servants’ quarters, a long, sunken wing with just a flat roof and a line of narrow windows showing above ground, connected with the Palace by a subterranean passage. This seems an extremely feeble, not to say depressing, solution to the problem of where to put the forty or so servants needed for the Palace. The crystal box is not for them, but there is certainly space enough in all directions, and apparently money enough, to have them at least housed on the surface, like their employers. In the old days, slaves were often kept in the dank basements of Rio houses; even now, the rooms and bathrooms provided for servants in up-to-date and luxurious Copacabana apartment houses shock the sensibilities of foreign residents — but surely in Brasília, sometimes referred to as “the most modern city in the world,” Niemeyer, of all architects, should not have found it necessary to put them underground.

As we were leaving the Palace I realized that its more disappointing features had reminded me, in some way, of the house Niemeyer built for himself in 1954, on a hillside just outside Rio, and when I got back home I looked up what Henry Russell-Hitchcock had had to say about that in his book Latin American Architecture. Confirming my own amateur suspicions, I found this: “The pavillion contains only the main living areas and the kitchen. All other facilities are hidden away below the terrace with no relationship at all to the pavillion on top. Only, perhaps, its own designer and his family would find this an altogether comfortable residence…” Niemeyer’s house, of course, is not at all like the Palace of the Dawn in Brasília, having been designed “in response to the landscape” in an interlocking set of curves, “in a harmony between the boldly rounded outline of the hills and the sinuous curves of his plan.” Niemeyer’s response to the flat empty spaces of Brasília has been this transparent, gracefully supported, but essentially severe, box; but in both cases his solution of practical problems seems to have been the same: put them underneath, or underground, like a lazy housewife shoving household gear out of sight under a deceptively well-made bed.

Off to the south east of the Palace, a small white triangle in the distance, is the “Hermitage of Saint John Bosco” a faithful copy in white marble of an Indian teepee — American Indian, that is, with the open triangular doorway but with a cross on top in place of criss-crossed tent-poles. One of the booklets about Brasília explains the presence of this rather surprising chapel: “In the book Biographical Memories, Vol XVI pages 385 and 395, can be found the tale of Saint John Bosco’s prophecy. It tells there that Dom Bosco, on the thirtieth of August, 1883, had a dream-vision. We give the quotation in respect to Brasília.

“‘Between the fifteenth and twentieth parallels, in the place where a lake was formed, will be born a great civilization and this will happen in the third generation. Here will be the promised land.’

“We are in the third generation exactly. The great civilization under construction (and which is Brasília) is located between the fifteenth and the twentieth parallels. The lake will be formed by the streams Torto and Gama.

“Thus the prophetic dream of Dom Bosco will be fulfilled.”

Laura Huxley was familiar with the life of this Italian saint, the founder of the Silesian order (which does much work in Brasil), and was eager to start off on a walk to see the “hermitage.” However, it was pointed out that actually the chapel was about a mile away, and at that moment the light was beginning to change to a clear uniform pink, the beginning of the sudden sub-tropical sunset. As we left, a group of small soldiers, members of the Brasília Guarda Especial, marched solemnly past changing guard, pounding with their heavy boots; in their unstarched green uniforms, they always look like wilted string beans.

* * *

In the hotel lounge before starting out, Maya, the Polish girl, had run into another Polish former-refugee, Countess Tarnowska, who had invited us all to come to the Santos Dumont Hotel in the Free City for a drink before dinner. Some time before Countess Tarnowska had opened a movie house in Annapolis and shortly after the founding of Brasília she opened another one in the Free City. There were then three hundred people in the town and her cinema was in a wooden barn; now she has the largest building there, of corrugated iron, seating three hundred people, and there is even a rival movie house. She is young and handsome; in excellent English she told us blithely, “We love it here! Of course there are lots of fires. The bank next door burned down yesterday. We were frightened for the cinema a bit, but everything turned out all right. Too bad you missed the excitement!” Dressed in blue jeans, with a straw hat tightly bound down with a white scarf that swathed her neck, she and her beautiful dark-eyed daughter, also in jeans and khaki shirt, had resembled two heroines of an old western, a sepia western, since they were both covered with the usual dust.

We now drove towards the city, over the head of the bird, where the Esplanade of the Three Powers will be. At present it is a confusing, noisy scene of earthwork, trucks and bulldozers, with work going on day and night. Someone behind me was trying to explain the lay-out of the Esplanade. “You see, it’s a triangular rectangle,” he kept saying. The Englishman was trying to find the land acquired by his country for its future Embassy and when a vague area of the scrubby, termite-infested land was pointed out to him he said, “Oh! I’m so disappointed!” in such a crestfallen way that everyone laughed.

We passed the “superblocks” of apartments being built by the institutos; skeletons of steel and cement, it was hard to tell much about them except that they are very high and very close together, and again, with infinite space in all directions, it is hard to understand why they should be placed together at all, and with courtyards and area-ways not much larger than those in Rio — explicable because there actually is very little building space left, and real-estate values are higher than in New York.

The streets of Brasília have been planned to do away with traffic lights completely by means of over- and under-passes. Since the present capital is famous for the terrifying speed of its traffic, light-jumping, mad bus-drivers, and high accident rate, this is one innovation that has been welcomed by all.

* * *

It was growing dark when we reached the Free City, but it was not too dark to see it: almost that old, familiar, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer frontier town, but real, and greatly enlarged. The wide dirt streets are without sidewalks—“Imagine what it’s like when it rains!” we told each other — and the wooden houses, with peaked roofs and occasional false fronts, are set close together, all shapes, sizes, and colors. We passed the corrugated iron cinema, and a big red barn with IGREJA PRESBYTERIANA in white letters across the gable. The traffic is mostly trucks, of all makes and ages, and jeeps, jeeps, jeeps, American, English, and Brasilian-made, with a few old cars and even a few men on horseback, all churning up thick clouds of dust.

The Hotel Santos Dumont is a low building, indistinguishable from the rest except for its sign and a few metal porch chairs placed on a narrow strip of cement flush with the street. Once inside, however, we seemed to have been bodily transported to a new little boîte or espresso bar in Greenwich Village — new because all the colors were bright and fresh, almost the only fresh colors I saw in the whole of Brasília. It was a rectangular room about thirty feet long, with a varnished bamboo bar and two boys in mess jackets; the table cloths were scarlet, there were black “drugstore” chairs, and bright yellow and green frills around the windows. Music was playing; I looked and saw Villa Lobos, Stravinsky, and Bartók records lying on the victrola. All this had been lugged in six hundred miles or more by truck. The Santos Dumont was modestly doing its best to be chic and cheerful and I think all our hearts warmed towards it.

Tables were pushed together and Countess Tarnowska, now clean and polished in an India print dress and bandanna, called for whiskey sours. But our temperate little party, perhaps slightly over-awed by Huxley (he had spoken once or twice about the unnecessary drinking and smoking that go on in the United States), refused alcohol for the most part and drank orange juice, which was mysteriously available. Countess Tarnowska, the daughter, and a heavy, blond Polish gentleman who was staying at the hotel, too, had just returned from a three-weeks’ hunting trip, farther to the west, and she began telling us about it. They had had bad luck; they had been after onça, the Brasilian jaguar, but hadn’t found any, and instead they had shot a great many of what she referred to with flashing eyes as “stags.” It had been the daughter’s first hunting trip and, said her mother proudly, “She shot twelve alligators.” From hunting Tarnowska went on to speak of murderous propensities she had observed in Brasil in general and in Brasília in particular. “They like killing,” she assured Huxley, with beautiful vivacity, and told an anecdote about a recent gratuitous shooting. At my end of the table the Huxleys, Maya, the Englishman and myself all being rather strongly anti-shooting, man or beast (and my own experience of Brasilians being that they are the least bloodthirsty of peoples) the conversation began to fall a little flat, and Huxley, who had said almost nothing so far, shaded his eyes with his hand and seemed lost in meditation over his mysterious orange juice.

She then told a story of her movie house that illustrated the national character a bit better. The forty-five thousand citizens of the Free City mostly come from the interior, the “north” or the “south”—and it is hard to realize the weight of the vast unknown, or half-known, that these ordinary terms of direction can still carry in Brasil — simple, old-fashioned, country people, a type called condangos. One of the films shown recently had been “And God Created Woman.” The audience, many more men than women, had watched quietly, thinking heaven knows what, until the story reached the disrobing scene. Brigitte Bardot had undone one button when the movie suddenly stopped and the lights went up. The man in the projection booth, who had obviously watched it through before, said, “Will all the senhoras and senhoritas please leave, and wait outside.” And leave they did, without demur, and stood outside in the dusty street in a little crowd. The theatre was darkened and the men watched the love scene that followed. Again the film stopped, the lights went on, and the ladies were invited back in, to see the rest of the show coeducationally.

We asked what was playing that night, with some idea of going to see it. It was a travelling show of skits, singing and dancing, and Countess Tarnowska, who had watched a rehearsal, did not recommend it.

We left the hotel and took a walk down the main street. Almost every building has its own electric generator (using more precious gasoline every minute), so there is a background music of pulsing and chugging and the lights vary from building to building, yellow, blueish, or grayish, with here and there the deep yellow of kerosene lamps or the blue-white glare of gasoline pressure lanterns. We strolled along observing barber shops and pharmácias (both doing rush business), grocery stores, dry good stores, and shoe-shine and shoe-repair shops — boot, rather, since all the male population of Brasília wears high boots, usually of a variety with an accordion-like section of imitation ripples above the ankle. Boarding houses, dormitories and restaurants; banks and airline offices, given a spurious city-look with ripped wall-board and a potted palm. Some furniture stores with new furniture but most crammed with second-hand Brasilian Grand Rapids, always included the lean armoires of closetless countries. The Butcher Shop of the Good Jesus, the suspended meat an iridescent violet under the light of hissing gasoline lamps. (And where had it come from?) Then small glass-fronted shops, exactly like other such shops all over Brasil: shoddy shirts and blouses and pink and blue undergarments, plastic bags and belts, and hung up in front, rows of umbrellas, black for men and brightly colored for women — because in Brasil everyone, no matter how poor, with the possible exception of the Indians we were going to see, owns an umbrella. Also baby dresses, booties and bibs, and even christening robes in glistening little piles like marshmallow sauce, because also no matter how poor, Brasilians will spend money on finery for their babies. A popular song, sung in English, blared out from a shop selling radios and victrolas.

As we went along we bought packages of cigarettes, boxes of matches, and Salva Vidas, Life Savers, to take to the Indians the next day. Antônio Callado, more experienced with the Indians than the rest of us, went into a shop full of boots, felt hats, machetes and guns, and came back with fish-hooks and nylon fish lines. The radio at the Indian post we were going to had been broken for over a month and there was no way of letting them know we were coming, so he also laid in a supply of sausage in case their food supply should be low.

Several of us met in a narrow bar at right angles to the streets, painted a dark sea-green. In it, alluring as a mermaid in her cave, stood a plump, sulky, pretty young woman with bleached hair and a very décolleté black sweater. Two small, pink-cheeked children, a boy and a girl, obviously hers, on the counter, staring at the one customer, a man drinking beer. Laura Huxley decided to get a photograph of the children with her Polaroid Land camera, using the headlights of the Volkswagen bus for light, and they posed, shy and blinking. From time to time the girl’s husband stuck his head through a flowered curtain at the back of the bar, keeping his eye on us. The girl’s parents had been Lebanese immigrants; she spoke a little French. We asked her how she liked living in Brasília, or in the Free City, and she replied promptly: “Je le déteste! — But my husband likes it all right.” They were from São Paulo and she missed the city; she was of a new, sophisticated city class, without the formal, old-fashioned manners of the condangos. When we left she stood languidly holding the drying photograph, almost forgetting to call “Thank you” after us. Brigitte Bardot would not have surprised her.

Then back the fifteen miles to the hotel (and distances seem even farther than they are, perhaps because there are so few landmarks), for a dinner that ended after eleven o’clock. News that Huxley was at the hotel had spread among the party-guests from São Paulo; before dinner the taller man from Itamarati had been taken for Huxley and another woman of the group for Mrs. Huxley, and both asked for autographs. When the mistakes were corrected, Huxley and Laura obligingly signed their names on dinner menus (Bife Stroganoff). Huxley didn’t mind not being recognized; at dinner he told a little story of another recent experience of mistaken identity. Before starting out for Brasil he had visited his dentist in Beverly Hills, and as he walked out of the elevator he met a woman about to get in. She looked up at him and stepped back in astonishment, then inquired, “Pardon me, but aren’t you Theda Bara’s husband?”

After midnight, kept awake by strains of dance-music from the hotel dining-room, where the President’s party was in progress, I lay in bed studying the illuminated green-blue aquarium of the Palace of the Dawn, off in the distance. It is a pity, I decided, that the kite-like pillars are not spot-lit at night. As it is, their effectiveness is lost after dark because they show up only as formless shadows on the lighted glass box. But undoubtedly they eventually will be.

* * *

The next day, Sunday, was the day for the Indians. At six-thirty we met outside the hotel in the damp, chilly dawn; the Volkswagen bus was supposed to be there, but, with the confusion probably incidental to founding a new city, it kept us waiting for almost an hour, and to keep warm we took brisk walks around the cement parking space. The stork-like Huxley legs went around it faster than anyone else’s without any effort, and watching those giant steps our clammy little group, laden down with books, baskets, and sun hats, murmured to each other in Portuguese that he looked “young for his age.” We were a rather highbrow set. On our way to see the most primitive people left in the world, except for the African pygmies, we had, among us: Martin Buber’s “The Eclipse of God,” Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” and “Heaven and Hell,” in Portuguese, and “Grey Eminence” in English. Also being taken along to fill in the time on the trip were a thick French book titled simply “Plato” and a pocket edition of “The Mill on the Floss.”

Finally the bus arrived and we retraced the long red road to the airport. A few birds were singing, but not many, and the termites were hard at work in their unsightly red nests. Red ostrich plumes of dust rose here and there, trucks moving along with their loads of cement, girders, or fill, and the nagging sound of bull-dozers came from the direction of the Esplanade of the Three Powers.

At eight we took off in a Brazilian Air Force DC-3. It was a pleasant plane, if one can use the word for a plane, new, bare of all the usual paddings and curtains, but with blue plush seats, the backs of which could be folded over. It was meant for twenty-four passengers, and although several unknown men had now joined the party there were still so many extra seats that we could turn down the backs of alternate ones and put our feet up, the way we used to do on trains as children.

The continent rolled out underneath us to the west, a full-scale, dun-colored, bas-relief map. Trees grow along the wrinkles; the smaller streams are opaque olive-green. Occasionally higher ground breaks out into crumbling, fortress-like rocks, possibly the formations, Callado told us, that had given rise to the legend of the lost city that Colonel Fawcett searched for; we were flying over Fawcett territory. After a while we saw one large blue river, the Araguaia, flowing north, as all the rivers do, to join the Amazon, over a thousand miles away. Callado, dressed today in khaki drill, went down the aisle giving us each an anti-malaria pill from an enormous bottle: “Mostly for the psychological effect,” he said, “although we may meet some malarial mosquitoes.” Until it grew warmer the Air Force men kept on their stylish reefers of gray-blue wool with long-peaked caps to match. They were friendly and hospitable and began feeding us immediately: sandwiches, then gumdrops and jelly beans, and then paper cups of sweet black coffee, at least three times, but this is de rigueur on any Brasilian plane, sometimes even on Brasilian buses. Later the plane filled with the smell of oranges as a helpful aviator sliced off the peels of a whole tray for us.

We dipped into our various books and swapped them across the aisle; we changed places to talk to each other, like a dance. The young interpreter ate a large chocolate bar and devoted herself to a magazine called Lady (pronounced “Lah-dee”). She handed it across to show Huxley. There was a full page photograph of him at a recent press conference in Rio, shading his eyes and looking very sad. His wife was indignant about the expression: “Oh, why do they always take him looking like that! He really doesn’t look like that at all!” I was bothered more by the huge caption: THE OLD HUXLEY SAYS — something about world peace. Although Huxley does not know Portuguese, he does know Spanish and I was afraid he might recognize the similar word for “old.” I had a brief argument with myself as to whether I should try to explain or not, then decided to hold my tongue. In this case I felt the word was meant affectionately, or “old” only in the sense of Huxley’s having been famous for many years. (For two weeks Huxley had been making a deep impression in Rio; the bookshops were filled with his books, in five languages, and he had received nothing but unqualified praise and consideration from the press.)

One of the men who had joined us was an exuberant type, who couldn’t sit still but kept prancing up and down the aisle with a leather gaucho hat tied under his chin. Another was old and tiny, large-eared and mournful-eyed. He, I discovered, was the man who had been supposed to meet me at the airport two days before; at that very moment, he confessed, he was supposed to be meeting a party arriving from Rio, but on the spur of the moment had decided to come along with us instead. He carried a clip-board with “Aldous Huxley” printed in capitals across the top sheet. He presented this and asked if Huxley would write a message on it — his impressions of Brasília, anything at all — for a collection of such messages from all visiting celebrities he was making, to be put in a future Brasília museum. Huxley took out his pen and set to work, and after tearing up two or three sheets of paper he produced a few phrases about the interesting experience of flying from the past (the colonial towns in Minas) to the future, the brand-new city of Brasília. Two days later this appeared in the Rio papers as a telegram Huxley had sent to President Kubitschek, giving a rather odd impression of the Huxley telegram style.

We were now flying more north than west and the scenery below had gradually changed. We flew over the River of the Dead, and then the River of the Souls. There were areas of what Callado called the “cauliflower forests.” From above, jungle trees do look like massed cauliflower, or even more, broccoli, although here not as thick nor as vivid a green as in the Amazon region. At last someone exclaimed “Look! An Indian village!” and sure enough, there in a clearing beside a muddy little river were five round roofs of palm thatch and two or three stick-like boats pulled up on the bank. Beyond them was an air-strip, an inch or two of faded red tape dropped into the jungle. It was the post of Xavantina, named for the Xavante Indians (x is pronounced sh), formerly fierce warriors, the Indians who are familiar from photographs posing on one leg, and wearing their hair in long bobs. However, we were going on farther, to the Uialapiti at Captain Vasconcelos Post, on a small tributary of the Xingu River.

Callado, who was responsible for this part of the Huxley tour, now began to have a slight attack of nerves. He began to tell us not to expect too much of the Indians we were about to see; after all, they are at a Post, they are a mixed lot, sometimes as many as five tribes will be visiting there together, and those who live there permanently are somewhat “uninteresting,” he put it, not like those who live completely isolated in their own villages. Some of them sometimes wear a shirt or a pair of trousers (but the only possible reason for wearing clothes that they can understand is that they keep off the mosquitoes), and one man had actually been taken on a trip to Rio, to see the Carnival.

At last another air strip appeared, and another clearing on another small river, this time with clear water and the thatched roofs were oval. We circled over buriti palms and one tall purple îpé in full flower, without a single leaf — one of the loveliest of Brasilian flowering trees. As we dropped down we could see Indians coming out of the houses and running along a rough road from the village to meet us, and when we stepped from the plane five or six men were already there and women with babies were bringing up the rear. They were very glad to see us, beaming with smiles, reaching eagerly for our hands, right or left, and squeezing them; two or three of the men said “Good-day, good-day” in Portuguese. More and more kept coming running, squeezing our hands or shaking them limply, smiling with delightfully open and cheerful expressions, showing square, widely spaced teeth.

The Uialapiti are short but well-built, the men almost plump, with smooth muscles, broad shoulders, and smooth broad chests. They are naked except for shell necklaces and strings of beads or shells around the hips; the women wear a symbolic cache sexe of palm leaf folded into a little rectangle about an inch and half long, secured by a fine string woven from the same palm. This almost invisible article of dress is important; sometimes they stop and turn their backs to adjust the string. Their hair is very thick and surprisingly fine and glossy; the women wear it long, with bangs; the men in inverted bowl haircuts. They have almost no hair on their bodies; the occasional hair is pulled out. Most of the men had locks of hair or the whole crown of the head smeared with a bright red, sticky paint they make from the urucum tree, the only dye, and color, they possess; some of them were powdered with it, ears, necks, or chests, hot red. Their skin is fine and soft, a deep dusky color. Some of the children, girls, had two parallel black lines drawn down the outside of their legs, and one young girl had a bright red forehead, suggestive of a bad headache. Both men and women carry the babies, and besides their own shell beads most of them wear strings of blue and white glass ones. A baby girl, about ten months old, looked fetching in nothing but six strands of big Woolworth pearls. They are sweet-smelling and clean (they go swimming several times a day) — excepting that the children had filthy, muddy faces. However, that didn’t stop the Air Force men from plucking the babies (including the pearl-clad one) from the parents’ arms and carrying them off. There was an agreeable Old-Home-Week atmosphere. Callado and the pilots knew most of the men; some of them spoke a little Portuguese, and a simple, repetitious conversation started that kept going without ceasing all during our visit. Huxley was introduced as a “great captain,” um grande capitão, and allowed himself to be admiringly handled.

It was dusty and very hot; we walked through the cleared path to a big hard-beaten space where four houses stood. A large black sow with baby pigs rushed off when she saw us, and there were many skinny dogs. More Indians kept coming to meet us and stare and hold our hands in their hard hot ones, and sometimes to pat us discreetly to make out whether we were men or women, since the women of the party were in slacks. All the Indians were quite naked except one old man who had on an Army shirt and two young women who wore red and white flowered cotton dresses. One of these, fourteen or fifteen years old, was far advanced in pregnancy, and the other, older one, was a dwarf or hunchback, a queer, sad little figure whom we kept seeing bustling about the village all during our visit, as if she worked more than the others, or wanted to give the impression that she was as active as anyone else.

Suddenly a white man appeared, middle-aged, thin, a week’s growth of black beard on his pale face, wearing pants and shirt but in his bare feet. It was the man in charge of the Captain Vasconcelos Post, Claudio Villas Boas, one of three brothers who have all worked for the Indian Protection Service for many years. Because of the broken radio he couldn’t have known we were coming until he heard the sound of the plane, but he showed not a trace of surprise until his eyes happened to light on Huxley. Huxley and Laura were introduced. In Portuguese, in a weak voice, Villas Boas exclaimed, “Not the Huxley? Contraponto? “and for a moment he actually seemed about to faint. He took Huxley’s hand and talked away to him in Portuguese, with his eyes filled with tears. At this moment another clothed white man in his bare feet appeared from nowhere, a tall, handsome, baby-faced boy with a bushy black beard. He, too, exclaimed, but in the accents of upper-class England, “Huxley! I certainly never expected this!” He turned out to be a Cambridge graduate student, a historian, who had been at the post for a month. He was working on a thesis on the effects of contact between two different cultures, and also writing a book. “Or I’d better be,” he said, “since I’ve already sold it.”

With Villas Boas leading we all trooped into the shadowy interior of one of the houses; this one joined another smaller one with walls half-way up and a large table, and a third hut attached to it that served as a sort of kitchen. Huxley got into one of the hammocks and lay back (it became him very well); Villas Boas squatted Indian-style beside him, and with two or three people all helping to interpret, he began talking to Huxley in a rusty, agitated voice as if he had been wanting to talk to him for years. We gathered round to listen and it was a strained, moving little scene: the great shadowy hut, the oddly-assorted, oddly-dressed white people, the ring of naked, smiling Indians, and Huxley, swaying slightly back and forth, his long legs trailing on the ground, passive and attentive. Villas Boas told him that he had read all his books that had been translated into Portuguese, how much they had meant to him, going on to speak of Huxley’s grandfather’s books, too. Then he told about his years in the Indian service, how hard it is to help the Indians, a losing battle against disease and corruption; how even with the help of Army doctors he lives in dread of infections brought in from outside, the one case of measles, for example, that can wipe out whole villages. The Indians own no land; there are no reservations for them to retreat to if the lands where they live should ever be sold. Even if that will probably not happen for a long time, the land is subject to speculation, and the founding of Brasília has brought the possibility nearer by six hundred miles. In the whole Xingu region he thinks there are now only about thirty-five hundred of them left.

Laura Huxley had wandered outside and was setting up shop with the Polaroid camera; these Indians knew all about cameras and were happy to pose, in rows, with their arms about each other’s necks. Those inside pressed up against us, not exactly begging, but certainly eager for the presents they knew we’d have, and half-embarrassed, we handed out our miserable cigarettes, matches, and Life Savers. One woman kept pinching me gently asking Caramelo? Chocolate? Caramelo? and I was sorry I hadn’t known of this preference in sweets. The hammocks were filling up; the man with the volume labelled Plato reclined in one, a pilot was playing with a baby in another, and the gaucho-hat man was in another with another baby, who now wore the hat. I got into a hammock, too, and looked up. The high shadowy roofs are beautifully made, palm leaves folded over horizontal branches, in overlapping layers, and the big dome is braced towards the top with a framework of unpeeled branches. Pigeons roosted there, cooing, and a pair of parakeets. A gorgeous blue and yellow macaw sat on the dining-hut wall eyeing us and talking away in Nu-aruak, presumably — the language group to which the Uialapiti belong. Several mutum, a kind of turkey, black and shiny, with crests like ball-edged combs and patches of pale green on either side of their chic little heads, strolled about clucking under our legs. The gloom, the gentle voices, the pats and smiles and swaying hammocks, were restful and dreamlike, down-to-earth, even nostalgically back-to-earth, after the three hours in the plane.

I could hear an Indian questioning the Air Force man in the nearest hammock. He asked Huxley’s name, which woman was his, and how many children they had. The man answered the questions; the Indian studied Huxley, smiling, asked them all over again, and received the same answers. (Their conversation, I was told, moves rather like a glacier. A simple story can go on for hours, even for days.) As any one who has ever seen photographs of Huxley on his book-jackets knows, he is a very handsome, aristocratic-looking man, but the Indian’s final opinion, given in a tactfully lowered voice, was “Homely … homely…” And under the circumstances Huxley did appear, not homely, but exceedingly long, white, refined, and misplaced.

After a while we went outside and down to the river, where some of us went for a swim, the Indians sociably joining in. Usually the villages are as far as a mile inland from the rivers, to get away from the mosquitoes, and the whole village files through the jungle every morning, or morning and evening, to go swimming.

One young Indian was a visitor from the Caiapos, a tribe that has been in contact with white men for only two years. (New tribes are still being met, while there are some who have been known for two hundred years.) The visitor appeared in pants and a shirt, his hair flowing down his back and tied with a white hair-ribbon, and in his lower lip a smooth oval plate of wood, four inches across, the under side dyed red. He was a cheerful, talkative boy (“Nice, but rather foolish,” Callado said); when asked to pose for a photograph he politely removed his clothes. In swimming with us, doing a kind of breast-stroke, he threw water into his mouth with the wooden plate and drank like a duck. The English boy called him “Ronny,” which was fairly close to his vowel-filled Indian name.

Because it was the end of the dry season the little river was only waist deep, but the bottom was clean and sandy, and there were green hummocks, vines, and clumps of delicate palms, all rather like the wood-engravings in old books of exploration. “Ronny’s” boat was on the bank, filled with bundles of palm thatch ready to take back to his own village. It had been simply made, by slitting the bark of a tree length-wise and prying it off in one piece with wedges; the bark shell is then pried open with sticks, the ends bent upwards, it is left to dry out, and with very little trouble, you have a very nice light canoe. We dawdled about on the bank, taking more photographs. The Indians loved the Polaroid pictures (in fact a Polaroid camera and a large supply of film should see one through the jungle), almost tearing them apart to see the results; Huxley’s pocket was adroitly picked of some unsuccessful ones that Laura had stored in it. A mass of pale yellow Sulphur butterflies settled, quivering, in the wet mud at the river’s edge, like the start of a yacht race; a few magnificent ones of a variety unknown to me among them, the closed wings exactly mimicking a big silver-gray dead leaf and when open flashing two bars of pure, startling rose-red velvet. Huxley took great pleasure in these butterflies, leaning far over from his great height to examine them close to with his magnifying glass.

Then we were called to lunch: the sausage we had brought, a pot of brown beans, and two platters of under-cooked rice. (The usual food is manioc; the rice had been a recent present.) “Ronny” put on trousers and helped wait on us, filling tin mugs with water, ladling out the runny beans, and flapping his lip-plate up and down in a friendly way. The blue and yellow macaw was prevented from jumping onto the table and the Indians stood close, watching every bite and smiling hard whenever one caught their eyes. I was wearing small gold earrings and every once in a while the lobe of my ear would be gently pinched. After the beans and rice came more little coffees; we lit cigarettes for the Indians, they painstakingly lit cigarettes for us, and langour settled over us all.

After half an hour’s siesta we were invited to see a wrestling match put on for our benefit. Two of the sleekest young men began, with the rest of the population sitting in the strips of shade along the houses to watch. The men crouch almost on all fours, grasp each other’s hands in a hard shake, and then grab for the backs of each other’s necks and hold on, still bent over and giving loud, hooting grunts — the only sounds we heard them make that could be called “savage.” The object of the match is to throw the opponent over and pin his shoulders to the ground, but as soon as one man senses he is the stronger he rarely forces it to a conclusion. He simply lets go, they stand up, smile, and walk off abruptly, in different directions. The quick, red-bedaubed, naked men, stamping and hooting in the urine-scented dust, resemble fighting-cocks more than anything else.

Then we paid a call at the largest of the houses, thirty-five or forty feet long, dark and sooty. Men were swaying in their hammocks, women messed about with manioc and clay pots on the floor. The men asked for more cigarettes and to please them I lit a cigarette apiece for them with my lighter. The one old man grinned mischievously and I saw, tucked away in the hammock between his tough black feet, four whole packages of cigarettes he had already collected, and several little blue boxes of Fiat Lux matches. Across one end of the house was a man-high fence of twigs and palm-leaves. The Cambridge student told us that behind it, in the dark, a young girl was undergoing her puberty initiation. “You can look through the fence; this isn’t the really secret part,” he said. Peering into the gloom we could make out a lean-to, perhaps two feet wide at the base, against the far wall. In it, silent and invisible, the girl is supposed to stay for three months, six months in some tribes, only coming out at night to get a little fresh air. When the initiation is over, they are very weak and many shades lighter than their normal color. The dwarf in the scarlet dress scuttled in with a pan of water and another of rice and set them down, in silence. Hanging in the rafters over our heads was an enormous polished black calabash and someone asked the Cambridge man what it was doing there. “Oh, they just happened to like it,” he informed us, and added innocently, “They’re human beings too, you know.”

In this region the nights get quite cold. The naked Indians keep warm by building small fires right under their hammocks and, too, the resulting smoke drives away the malarial mosquitoes. One woman was holding a very sick baby, the only sick, and thin, Indian we saw; all its small bones showed and its cough sounded like bronchitis. I believe we all felt the same horror and urge to do something, without being able to do anything at all. The adult Indians were all quite young, the man in the army shirt was the only one with gray hair and without teeth. They are short-lived and have few children, and also high infant mortality keeps the families down to one or two children a couple. I noticed several little vials of the kind used for injections scattered about, and every round dusky behind bore a vaccination mark (their rounded behinds and childishly smooth legs, in both sexes, are remarkably pretty).

Half a mile from the village they cultivate a manioc patch, their only attempt at agriculture, and manioc, soaked and scraped, was drying on frames outside the houses in white, sour-smelling cakes. Manioc and fish are the staple diet; they have no salt and rarely eat meat. A small wild fruit, strong and oily, called pequis, is thought to contribute something essential to the diet, but no one seems to know exactly what. Callado asked in vain for one dish for us, a kind of thin pancake of toasted manioc rolled up with fish and red pepper inside — their only food, he said, that is palatable to a white man. But that week there was to be a big funeral feast lasting several days, and they were smoking whatever fish they caught to save up for the occasion. The death, that of a head man in another village, had occurred some time ago, but the festivities had to wait until the supply of fish on hand warranted them.

We were also sorry not to see them fish with bow and arrow; they were extremely skillful at hitting the moving fish in the moving water, making allowances for refraction; they rarely miss. The children play with carelessly made bows and arrows, and their arrows are tipped with small calabashes pierced with holes, so that they make a long screaming noise in flight. The Uialapiti make no pottery nor baskets. For centuries one tribe has made one article, pots, bows and arrows, baskets, shell collars, etc., and exchanged it for the speciality of another tribe. They do no work at all, as we consider work; in fact as the Portuguese found out very early in the history of Brasil, if put at any kind of steady labor they promptly sicken and die. They are gentle with each other and with their children; so much so that when, at the edge of the river, a mother began scrubbing a little boy’s face, and he began to scream in a perfectly normal way, the unexpected, unique sound startled us all. They never strike or punish the children; in fact they have no conception of punishment. If an Indian murders another, everyone is very sorry; the murderer is very sorry, too, and perhaps gives presents to the widow, but nothing further is done about it. All property is in common and the Indian Protection Service itself follows the tactful policy of at least not appearing to keep anything locked up; they do, naturally, but the Indian is allowed to rummage through much of the Service’s belongings.

Our pilots wanted to get back to Brasília before dark if possible, the landing field there not being well lighted, so about four o’clock we reluctantly gathered ourselves together and walked back to the plane. When we got there, someone was missing; the young interpreter had disappeared with the Cambridge boy. So we sat down in the shadow of a wing and waited, we and all the village that could squeeze into the shade with us, making conversation as best we could. The man in the gaucho hat had an accumulation of bows and arrows and two spears. By now we were thirsty and tired; we looked the other way as he still pranced energetically about in a war-dance of his own invention. Our pilot appeared, naked to the waist, very pleased with himself, with a small green parrot on his shoulder; he had given his shirt for it. A little girl with black lines down her legs leaned on my knees and the man who so admired my earrings leaned on my shoulder and asked my name for the tenth time, while a brighter-looking friend repeated it correctly. “Laura” was easy for them; “Aldous” gave trouble, and they gave us their own names over and over, pointing, cooing like doves. The earring-fancier examined my wristwatch and then asked once more if I were single. He pointed to his chest and said he was a widower, then talked away in Nu-aruak to the brighter friend, who started to laugh. He had asked if I would stay behind and be his wife. This produced a great deal of tribal merriment, and although I was vain of having been singled out, I was afraid he merely did not want to be the Indian who threw away the pearl, richer than all his tribe.

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

“I Was But Just Awake”

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.

The introduction is a de la Mare-ish allegorical account of how he discovered poetry as a boy, — or perhaps it is not allegorical but the literal truth. This is the one part of the book that might seem a bit dated to an adult reader; but by means of dream-like landscapes, old ladies in lost farmhouses, mysterious tower rooms crammed with old trunks and books, in his own way de la Mare is explaining how the anthology was made up, and also letting fall some wise thoughts on the writing of verse in general. In the tower room the boy finds books filled with copied-out poems and sets to work re-copying them for himself. “I had never sat in so enormous a silence; the scratching of my pen its only tongue.… I chose what I liked best … such as carried away the imagination; either into the past or into another mind, or into the all-but-forgotten; at times as if into another world.”

The old lady says to him: “Remember you are as old as the hills which neither spend nor waste time, but dwell in it for ages, as if it were light or sunshine.”

Later on in the notes he tells the story of the mediaeval traveller who made a complete circuit of the world without knowing it, and came back to where he’d started from. To illustrate this story the book begins and ends with the same poem: This is the Key of the Kingdom: a gentle hint to turn back and read it through again. He also points out that “many of the customs, beliefs, lore they [ballads] refer to may be found scattered up and down throughout the world.” Since his vision of both time and poetry seems to be cyclical, he is implying, I think, by the story of the copying, that simple repetition of poetry, copying or memorizing, is a good way of learning to understand it, possibly a good way of learning to write it. Isn’t the best we can do, he seems to be saying, in the way of originality, but a copying and re-copying, with some slight variations of our own?

The book proper consists of songs and ballads, folk-poetry, and frankly romantic poems, all chosen for melodiousness as well as romance. There is nothing “intellectual”, “metaphysical”, or even “difficult”, as de la Mare says when he gives Sabrina fair … leaving out the passages most clotted with classical reference. Of Shakespeare, for example, there are only songs; of George Herbert, Easter, Virtue, and Love (the one that meant so much to Simone Weil). Donne and Hopkins are mentioned only in the notes; of Donne he says (and this explains many of the selections or omissions): “It is a poetry that awaits the mind as the body grows older, and when we ourselves have learned the experience of life with which it is concerned. Not that the simplest poetry will then lose any of its grace and truth and beauty — far rather it shines the more clearly, since age needs it the more.” Blake, Shakespeare, and Shelley have the most poems; Coleridge, Keats, and Christina Rossetti come next. But it is not an anthology to be judged by names or allotments, and there are many more anonymous and single poems than anything else. The sections have titles like Morning and May, Dance, Music, and Bells, and Far, to name but three of the sixteen. But there are also sections on war and death; and under War I was very glad to see Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, which de la Mare calls “magnificent”. (I have always wished it could be the national anthem.) There is a late 17th century poem by William Cleland, Hallo My Fancy, that might almost be describing the anthology itself.

In melancholic fancy,

Out of myself,

In the vulcan dancy,

All the world surveying,

Nowhere staying …

De la Mare has some practical things to say about meters (which he used so beautifully himself), and even suggests how to read certain of the poems; but he never speaks directly of any of the usual concerns of the critics; for one, let’s say, “imagery”. Instead, the old woman of the introduction tells the boy: “learn the common names of everything you see … and especially those that please you most to remember: then give them names also of your own making and choosing — if you can.” And wouldn’t that be imagery? He loves “little articles”, home-made objects whose value increases with age, Robinson Crusoe’s lists of his belongings, homely employments, charms and herbs. As a result he naturally chose for his book many of what Randall Jarrell once called “thing-y” poems, and never the pompous, abstract, or formal.

After the poems come the notes, and the book is well worth buying for them alone. It is a Luna Park of stray and straying information. He quotes journals, letters, samplers, gravestones, and his friends; then throws in a few recipes. He discusses the calendar, that “anomalous litter of relics”. He is against rigid rules of spelling, and cruelty to animals and children. Would you like to know the name of Noah’s dog? Or the derivation of “cat’s-cradle”? Or read the world’s earliest poem? They are all here, and de la Mare’s transparent delight in what he is telling provokes immediate replies, which is probably just what he intended. One wants to interrupt: “Speaking of birds, Mr. de la Mare, — did you ever run across that pretty notion of Sir John Narborough’s, when he spent the winter of 1670 on the bleak coast of Patagonia, that the inquisitive penguins were like ‘little children standing up in white aprons’?” Since this is not in the book, I’m afraid he couldn’t have.

At my house as I write there is a four-month-old baby who has just discovered his voice; not his crying voice, but his speaking, singing, or poetry-voice, and he devotes stretches of the day to trying it out. He can produce long trills, loud or soft, and repeated bird-like cries, obviously with pleasure. There is also a little black girl of three who vigorously pedals a tricycle around and around in perfect time to an old Portuguese children’s song. Tere — sínha de Je — sús she goes, in mixolydian (I think), telling another story about the same Teresa as Crashaw’s (who is not in this book). And in the kitchen her mother sings one of this year’s crop of sambas, “home-made” annually in endless variety by the poor Negroes of the slums, full of topical facts and preposterous fancies: Come away with me on my little Lambretta, she sings.

Besides the hundreds of better-known and loved poems he chose, surely it is of this kind of random poetry that Walter de la Mare can make child readers, or us, aware; the kind to which he lent his fine ear with such loving attention. As the boy in the tower room copies his poems, “an indescribable despair and anxiety — almost terror even — seized upon me at the rushing thought of my own ignorance; of how little I knew, of how unimportant I was…” Then daylight comes, he puts down his pen and goes to the window: “I was but just awake: so too was the world itself, and ever is.” And in reading this book we can often recapture what children and other races perhaps still share: de la Mare’s lyrical confidence.

1958

Blurb for Life Studies

by Robert Lowell

As a child, I used to look at my grandfather’s Bible under a powerful reading-glass. The letters assembled beneath the lens were suddenly like a Lowell poem, as big as life and as alive, and rainbow-edged. It seemed to illuminate as it magnified; it could also be used as a burning-glass.

This new book begins on Robert Lowell’s now-familiar trumpet-notes (see “Inauguration Day”), then with the autobiographical group the tone changes. In these poems, heartbreaking, shocking, grotesque and gentle, the unhesitant attack, the imagery and construction, are as brilliant as ever, but the mood is nostalgic and the meter is refined. A poem like “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” or “Skunk Hour,” can tell us as much about the state of society as a volume of Henry James at his best.

Whenever I read a poem by Robert Lowell I have a chilling sensation of here-and-now, of exact contemporaneity: more aware of those “ironies of American History,” grimmer about them, and yet hopeful. If more people read poetry, if it were more exportable and translatable, surely his poems would go far towards changing, or at least unsettling, minds made up against us. Somehow or other, by fair means or foul, and in the middle of our worst century so far, we have produced a magnificent poet.

1959

“Writing poetry is an unnatural act…”

Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural. Most of the poet’s energies are really directed towards this goal: to convince himself (perhaps, with luck, eventually some readers) that what he’s up to and what he’s saying is really an inevitable, only natural way of behaving under the circumstances.

Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, in his discussion of Wordsworth, has a famous sentence. It says: “the characteristic fault of our elder poets is the reverse of that which distinguishes too many of our recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language, the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts.” He then goes on to quote some of George Herbert:

VIRTUE

“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky:

The dew must weep thy fall tonight;

For thou must die!”

LOVE UNKNOWN

that begins

“Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad:

And in my faintings, I presume, your love

Will more comply than help. A Lord I had…”

Another Herbert: LOVE

“Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back,

Guiltie of dust and sinne.”

and ends:

“‘You must sit down,’ sayes Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

So I did sit and eat.”

This, I later discovered in Waiting for God, was Simone Weil’s favorite; she translated it and knew it by heart.

The three qualities I admire in the poetry I like best are: Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery. My three “favorite” poets — not the best poets, whom we all admire, but favorite in the sense of one’s “best friends,” etc. are Herbert, Hopkins, and Baudelaire.

THE CHURCHE-FLOORE

“Hither sometimes Sinne steals, and stains

The marbles neat and curious veins: …

Sometimes Death, puffing at the doore,

Blows all the dust about the floore…”

His magnificent poem, THE SACRIFICE

“Arise, arise, they come. Look how they runne!

Alas! What haste they make to be undone!

How with their lanterns they do seek the sunne!

Was ever grief like mine!”

He has spontaneity, mystery, and accuracy, in that order?

Hopkins, WRECK OF THE DEUTSCHLAND

“Ah, touched in your bower of bone

Are you! turned for an exquisite smart,

Have you! make words break from here all alone,

Do you!—”

THE GRANDEUR OF GOD “it will flame out like shining from shook foil…”

“I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.”

Auden’s

B [Baudelaire] here—

“Altogether elsewhere, vast

herds of reindeer move across

miles — miles of golden moss

silently and very fast.”

It’s accurate, like something seen in a documentary movie. It is spontaneous, natural sounding — helped considerably by the break between adjective and noun in the first two lines. And it is mysterious.

The first lines of D. Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn”:

“Never,

Miss Moore’s — [“Plagued by the Nightingale”:]

Frost’s—

[Wordsworth, Shakespeare’s “Prithee undo this button”—everyone is moved to tears by it; it certainly is the height of spontaneity, and yet it is so mysterious they are still arguing as to whether it’s his own button or his daughter’s button …]

Burns — lacks mystery, maybe — but — weaker in the mystery—

“No matter what theories one may have, I doubt that they are in one’s mind at the moment of writing a poem or that there is even a physical possibility that they could be. Theories can only be based on interpretations of other people’s poems, or one’s own in retrospect, or wishful thinking.”

I’m not a critic. Critics can’t rest easy until they have put poets in descending orders of merit; they change the lists every night before they go to bed. The poet doesn’t have to be consistent.

Marianne Moore, MARRIAGE, that begins:

“This institution,

perhaps one should say enterprise…”

NEW YORK

“the savage’s romance,

accreted where we need the space for commerce—

the center of the wholesale fur trade…”

accuracy: from A GRAVE

“The firs stand in procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top…”

skeleton

FROST: the ghost that “carried itself like a pile of dishes.”

ending of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Auden here—

a single word does it all

ROBERT LOWELL:

“Remember, seamen, Salem fishermen

Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.”

hung suggests the immensity, the depths of the cold stormy water and the tininess, the activity of the small “nimble” ships — and yet it’s the simplest sort of natural verb to use—

THE DEAD IN EUROPE

“After the planes unloaded, we fell down

Buried together, unmarried men and women…”

“O Mary, marry earth, sea, air and fire;

Our sacred earth in our day is our curse.”

DYLAN THOMAS:

“Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

With its horns through mist and the castle

Brown as owls…”

A REFUSAL TO MOURN

“Never until the mankind making

Bird beast and flower

Fathering and all humbling darkness

Tells with silence the last light breaking

And the still hour

Is come of the sea tumbling in harness…”

Baudelaire: “Les soirs illumines par l’ardeur du charbon…” where charbon is the telling word — surprising, accurate, dating the poem, yet making it real, yet making it mysterious—

Spontaneity — Marianne’s “Marriage,” “N.Y.”—

Herbert’s EASTER

“Rise, heart; the Lord is risen.”

Hopkins’ “Glory be to God for dappled things”—

My maternal grandmother had a glass eye. It fascinated me as a child, and the idea of it has fascinated me all my life. She was religious, in the Puritanical Protestant sense and didn’t believe in looking into mirrors very much. Quite often the glass eye looked heavenward, or off at an angle, while the real eye looked at you.

“Him whose happie birth

Taught me to live here so, that still one eye

Should aim and shoot at that which is on high.”

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.

(call the piece “Grandmother’s Glass Eye”???)

spontaneity occurs in a good attack, a rapid line, tight rhythm—

Brazilian Poetry: I am reading B.P. I began naturally with the living poets & I intended to work backwards into Brazilian and Portuguese poetry. I’ve found many good things, but I feel that I don’t know the language well enough, or the body of poets. To say anything about it at present would be an impertinence.

late 1950s — early 1960s

Some Notes on Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell, born in 1917, is the Prodigal Son of the “Pilgrim Fathers,” the Concord Transcendentalists, and the nineteenth-century industrialists. He is considered by nearly all of the good critics, American or English, as the greatest poet of the generation following that of Pound, Cummings, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, etc. In the years 1940–1950, his work was for Americans a surprise almost as great as that, some years later and in a totally different way, of Dylan Thomas for the English.

T. S. Eliot predicted that, with the battle won for “free verse” and demotic language in poetry, there would be a return to formal meter and stanza, even “intricated,” and to strict rhyme. The poems of Robert Lowell seem to have come to fulfill that prophecy, and sooner than was expected. His first book, Land of Unlikeness, was published in 1944, in an edition limited to 150 copies. His first trade book was Lord Weary’s Castle, 1946, which made him famous and for which he received, among other honors, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Some years later there appeared The Mills of the Kavanaughs, and more recently Life Studies. Since the publication of Life Studies, Lowell has devoted some of his time to translation; in 1961, we had his translation of Racine’s Phaedra. A book of shorter translations, from Baudelaire, Rilke, Montale, Pasternak, etc., appeared recently under the title Imitations. Lowell deliberately chose this word to describe his technique in translation; the poems are far from being literal translations; they constitute, in reality, new poems, in the already famous Lowell style. And as such they are praised by those who admire that style and criticized by those who prefer the more common form of word-for-word translation.

Lowell is of course a famous New England name. There is a city called Lowell that evolved around the Lowell mills of cotton textiles in the early nineteenth century. Robert Lowell is related to the famous nineteenth-century poet James Russell Lowell (who for many years was Ambassador to England) and also to the celebrated poet of “free verse,” Amy Lowell. He was born and raised in Boston, with the privileges but also the burdens accompanying that powerful local name. As expected, he went to Harvard, but he couldn’t adapt, and two years later transferred to Kenyon College, in Ohio, where he had as his “mentor” the southern Agrarian poet and “New Critic,” John Crowe Ransom.

At the beginning of the war, Lowell made a first attempt to enlist in the navy (his father had been a naval officer), but he was rejected for reasons of health. During the course of the war, however, he changed his mind about things and, when he was finally drafted for military service, he refused to serve. The United States had hundreds of conscientious objectors working in hospitals and special camps, but since Lowell had failed to register as a “pacifist,” he was sent to jail as a common criminal. Before that, he had already shocked his family and the city of his birth, by turning against New England Calvinism, even to the point of becoming a convert to Catholicism. I believe that at this time — like Eliot, Auden and others — he is a practicing Anglican. His poetry is profoundly religious and rich in biblical and ecclesiastical images, primarily so in his first two books. His religious interpretation of the world is in the tradition of his New England “ancestors”: the Mathers, Jonathan Edwards, Thoreau (who also went to jail), Hawthorne, etc. and the Brook Farm group.

It cannot be denied that, to the uninitiated reader, his poetry is difficult. Yet (in contrast, I think, to some of the more popular poems of Dylan Thomas), Lowell’s poetry, always totally honest with the reader, is invariably written in perfectly logical syntax and meaning. One’s initial difficulty, at times, lies in knowing what the poem’s subject actually is. Many of his poems are dramatic, spoken by different characters; on this score, he has been frequently compared to Browning. But, once one knows the scene and the character, the poem itself, despite its being subtle, involved, and full of linguistic associations — an astonishing mixture of demotic and formal language — is always lucid.

In the strange title of his second book, Lord Weary’s Castle, there is already embedded in part an explanation of Lowell’s poetry. It comes from the old ballad about a poor stonemason named “Lambkin” who built a castle for one Lord Weary, but who was deprived of his just payment. In this legend Lowell sees a parable for the modern world — the “castle”—the crushing superstructure of our civilization. Randall Jarrell, in Poetry and the Age, describes Lord Weary’s Castle: “The poems understand the world as a sort of conflict of opposites. In this struggle one opposite is that cake of custom in which all of us lie embedded … the inertia of the stubborn self … the obstinate persistence in evil that is damnation … imperialism, militarism, capitalism, Calvinism … the ‘proper Bostonians,’ the rich.… But struggling within this … is everything that is free or open, that … willingness that is itself salvation … the Grace that has replaced the Law, of the perfect liberator whom the poet calls Christ.”

The poems in this book and in The Mills of the Kavanaughs are almost all in rigorous stanzaic form with the frequent enjambment that has become Lowell’s characteristic mark. This technique gives these poems of profound religious belief and anguish, which were written during the war, their affect of urgency, panic almost.

In Life Studies, published in 1959, the heavy-beat rhythms and trumpet sounds are modified, modulated. The lines still rhyme, but irregularly so, and their extension depends more on phrasing that is natural or breath-like than on strophic forms. These poems are almost always elegiac and autobiographical, on everything that is his, family, father and mother, wife (he is married to Elizabeth Hardwick, the renowned literary critic and novelist) and only child. Lowell’s language is as grand, as moving, as brutal, at times, as formerly — but the poems are full of “humor,” of compassion, and of a simple affection for persons and places.

I have heard Brazilians affirm that the American writer Dreiser, for example, is a better writer than Henry James! And I believe that the same type of Brazilian reader might well make the same mistake about Lowell’s poems by deciding that Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg or even our rather pathetic “beat poets” come closer to the idea than he does to what should be the true “American” poet. To those readers I can only say this: the idea they have of American literature (and, incidentally, of America itself) is wrong. Our great, though difficult, artist-craftsmen — including, among others, James and Lowell — are the finest representatives of American literature.

Simply because the course of the language of poetry in English diverged so much from the same course in the Latin languages, Lowell will probably appear to the Brazilians to be more exotic stylistically than he really is. The battle to write poetry that is “at least as well written as prose,” as Pound used to say, and in spoken language, had almost been won by 1920. It must be difficult for Brazilian readers to realize that in this domain (I refer only to demotic language versus “poetic” language), English poetry is many decades ahead of poetry in the Latin languages. Lowell represents a sharp change in direction, even, if you wish, a turning backwards. Like Dryden, he once again made poetry hard, difficult, soaring, and masculine. In reality, the arts, it is clear, cannot be compared, but, by means that are very different from those employed by our “action painters,” Lowell expresses, with the same energy and beauty, the problems that any citizen of the United States who is over forty, has already faced and continues to face: the Depression, the War (or Wars), the Affluent Society, the ethics of foreign relations, the Bomb.

I am certain that the reader who manages to understand even a small portion of Robert Lowell’s poems — and they have no snares — will come to a better understanding, in the same measure, of the contemporary American land from which he comes.

1962

A Sentimental Tribute

When it means a book, I love the word Reader; it has only pleasant associations for me. I learned to read out of a reader, a small brown book still in my possession, rather worn and dirty, with some of the pictures colored in in crayon and my name appearing a good many times, in embryonic handwriting. My reader, like this selection of Miss Moore’s writings, is a mixture of prose and poetry. I seem to know it by heart, and I know some of Miss Moore’s poems by heart. The likenesses end there. No, not at all: a few of Aesop’s Fables appear in both books and both give “The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg” (except that in Miss Moore’s translation of La Fontaine’s version of the story, the goose is a hen). I find the presence of this small, pure, literary stream or rivulet both touching and miraculous: rising somewhere in the sixth century before Christ, running through millenniums of Ancient History and Middle Ages, flowing faster to refresh the jaded court of Louis XIV, sending off, here and there, little branches as far as country-school “primers,”—and then reappearing, “to sparkle out among the fern” in the work of our most sophisticated, most childlike, and dearest poet. “For men may come and men may go, / But I go on for ever.”

Miss Moore has proved her fondness for La Fontaine; probably she and Aesop would have got along well, too. All three derive much profit and pleasure from the folk-ways of birds and animals; they have little of the professional writer about them (I don’t know much about Aesop but I doubt that he had); their imaginations are strongly original but decorous and uninsistent, and they do relish a good moral. I am speaking here of the translator-and-essayist-Miss Moore; the poet-Miss Moore has all the same characteristics but is an infinitely more complicated personality, mysterious but frank, generous but strict, intimidating but lovable. Probably everyone who knows anything at all about American poetry has some sort of mental picture of Miss Moore; probably thousands have seen her. We have been lucky that in her later years she has been so generous and courageous about travelling all over the country to give readings and lectures. She has become almost a familiar figure, and this is one of the happier wonders of the literary age. I first met Miss Moore by appointment, in 1934, in the New York Public Library. I had actually picked out a tall, eagle-nosed, be-turbaned lady, distinguished-looking but proud and forbidding, as a possible Miss Moore, when to my great relief the real one spoke up. One can’t imagine a college student of literature making such a mistake these days.

A reader, says the dictionary, is to teach one how to read. It seems doubtful that anyone needs or wants to be taught to read Miss Moore at this date. However, in case any readers (in the “dear reader” sense) are unfamiliar with her work and this book is their introduction to it, I shall make a few suggestions as to how to read it. First, read the Foreword carefully. Then skip to the back and read the Interview with the Paris Review. Then concentrate for a long time — a week or so — on the twenty-three marvelous earlier poems. After that I think I’d read the prose pieces in chronological order (the dates are given at the back of the book); and by then one should be advanced enough to study the La Fontaine translations, or to take a holiday with the Carnegie Hall and Yul Brynner poems.

The Foreword is full of wonderful things, and it explains a lot, too, for those who want explanations. The best way to take it (and to take all of Miss Moore’s writing, poetry and prose) is as she herself takes the statements of ex-President Eisenhower (see page xvi)—at her word. “More than once after a reading,” she says, “I have been asked with circumspectly hesitant delicacy, ‘Your … poem, Marriage; would you care to … make a statement about it?’ Gladly.” (My italics.) It is the word gladly that is typical of Miss Moore: the obliging promptitude, the willingness to respond to all normal interest and requests, the democratic refusal to consider herself a privileged being, a White Goddess, to drape herself in chiffon and assume a deep, dark voice. Her sense of the age, her real sense of style (in clothes, I should add, as well as words), have kept her reassuringly 19th-century, yet, at the age of seventy-four, still the most modern of moderns.

“Appoggiaturas,” she says, “—a charmed subject. A study of trills can be absorbing to the exclusion of everything else.” One hesitates. Is that going too far? But then one remembers that gladly. She believes that what the poet and scientist have in common is their willingness “to waste effort.” Let us be poets over and above the call of duty. Give more than is required; throw in trills and appoggiaturas for the joy of it. Both in writing her own poetry and in judging that of others, her guiding principles are seen to have been passion, accuracy, and pleasure. Under each of these headings, of course, one could set down sub-headings, sometimes contradictory ones. For example: how does Miss Moore reconcile pleasure with the fatigue and drudgery that must go into writing? I once saw in her apartment two bushel baskets, the kind apples come in, full of rejected versions of a rather short review. I thought it was one of her very best reviews, but it is not in this collection. Does that mean that after two bushel-baskets-full of work it did not come up to her standards?

She admits the hard work: “I never knew anyone who had a passion for words who had as much difficulty in saying things as I do and I know I’m trying.” In spite of her wish to be clear and simple, this last phrase brings up the question that always baffles us with great artists of Miss Moore’s kind: the supremely original, nevertheless unpretentious, small-scale ones: Klee, Bissier, or Webern, for example. Just how deep does their self-consciousness go? I certainly can not measure it, and there is always the perfectly agreeable possibility that I am being teased a little on purpose. Lately I have heard one or two poets and critics sound upset because they don’t think that the poem about Yul Brynner is as good as, say, The Pangolin. How solemn can one get? Surely by now Miss Moore is entitled to write any old way, any new way, she wants to.

It is nice to think that the correspondence with the Ford Company will outlast the Ford. Imagine an examination for future English scholars, based on the First Ford Epistle: “I have seen and admired Thunderbird as a Ford designation. It would be hard to match; but let me, the coming week, talk with my brother who would bring ardor and imagination to bear on the quest.”

1. Give the derivation of the word Thunderbird.

2. Describe how the custom developed, in the mid-twentieth century, of asking famous poets to christen the automobile.

Miss Moore says of animals and athletes: “they look their best when caring least.” She says, “I had no ambition to be a writer” and I believe her implicitly. This is her greatest secret and her greatest lesson for us now, when ambition comes first, publicity-seeking second, and writing third. Think of Miss Moore’s years at the Branch Public Library; go to the tortoise, thou hare!

Another lesson we can learn from Miss Moore — if I may relish a moral or two myself — is in how to lead the city-life. Besieged by “culture,” bewildered as to what we should like and shouldn’t like, timid TV watchers or brave non-TV watchers, spending so much time and energy in criticising and comparing likes and dislikes — Miss Moore shows us how it is possible to preserve one’s own pure taste and go one’s own sweet way. We carp and are niggardly, but she can find a moment of lucidity in Eisenhower, and admire the Duke of Windsor’s prose.

She says she didn’t use to care for the word “poetry” and refused to use it for her “observations,” but that now she minds it less. She does not say why, but I believe that one reason why she minds it less is that she herself has done so much to elevate the associations with the word “poetry” since those 1920’s when she began to publish. She once told me (I hope I have the story right) that in the days of the suffragette parades she climbed to the top of a mail box during a demonstration. Whatever Miss Moore contributed to the cause of Votes for Women, how much more recklessly, bravely, and generously has she contributed to — let us use the word — poetry.

I should like to add a few complaints about this Viking Reader, complaints that really amount to why isn’t there more of it? I like the series of Viking Portables (some of which are called Readers, as well) much better. They are chunky books, semi-limp (I think it is called), pleasant to hold or carry or read in bed, the same size as my old original reader, only thicker (perhaps I think all readers should be that size), and they run to 600 or 700 pages. Think how much Miss Moore would go into one of them. And the price is (or was; maybe it has gone up) $2.00, instead of $6.95. I know I shall never understand publishers — but why shouldn’t Miss Moore be given in full, and why shouldn’t she be Portable too? Where, oh where are: The Hero, The Jerboa, The Plumet Basilisk, the Frigate Pelican, Peter, the gorgeously beautiful An Octopus?

And also I don’t like a bright orange jacket for someone whose great-great-grandfather came from Merrian Square, Dublin.

1962

Flannery O’Connor: 1925–1964

I never met Flannery O’Connor, but we had been exchanging occasional letters for the last eight years or so. She invited me to visit her at “Andalusia” in Milledgeville, and how deeply I regret now that I never did. The closest I got to it was once when a freighter I was traveling on to South America put into Savannah for overnight. Wandering through those dusty, fusty little squares, I suddenly realized I was in Flannery O’Connor country and thought perhaps I could get to see her. I put in a telephone call from the booth in the lobby of the largest hotel; I remember that while I waited I studied a display of pecans and of boxes of “Miss Sadie’s Bourbon Balls” on the candy and cigar counter just outside the booth. Quite soon a very collected, very southern voice answered and immediately invited me to “come on over.” Alas, the bus connections didn’t work out so that I could get back to my freighter in time to sail.

Later she sent me some colored snapshots of herself, some with her peacocks, some of her alone, always on crutches. In these amateur snapshots she looks, in spite of the crutches, younger than her age and very much alive. From Brazil I sent her a cross in a bottle, like a ship in a bottle, crudely carved, with all the instruments of the Passion, the ladder, pliers, dice, etc., in wood, paper, and tinfoil, with the little rooster at the top of the cross. I thought it was the kind of innocent religious grotesquery she might like, and I think she did, because she wrote:

If I were mobile and limber and rich I would come to Brazil at once after one look at this bottle. Did you observe that the rooster has an eyebrow? I particularly like him and the altar cloth a little dirty from the fingers of whoever cut it out.… I am altogether taken with it. It’s what I’m born to appreciate.

I feel great remorse now that I hadn’t written to her for many months, that I had allowed this friendship to dwindle just when she must have been aware she was dying. Something about her intimidated me a bit: perhaps natural awe before her toughness and courage; perhaps, although death is certain for all, hers seemed a little more certain than usual. She made no show of not living in a metropolis, or of being a believer, — she lived with Christian stoicism and wonderful wit and humor that put most of us to shame.

I am very glad to hear that another collection of her stories is to be published soon. I am sure her few books will live on and on in American literature. They are narrow, possibly, but they are clear, hard, vivid, and full of bits of description, phrases, and odd insights that contain more real poetry than a dozen books of poems. Critics who accuse her of exaggeration are quite wrong, I think. I lived in Florida for several years next to a flourishing “Church of God” (both white and black congregation), where every Wednesday night Sister Mary and her husband “spoke in tongues.” After those Wednesday nights, nothing Flannery O’Connor ever wrote could seem at all exaggerated to me.

1964

On the Railroad Named Delight

In the Western Hemisphere a 400th anniversary for a city is a rare event, and so Rio de Janeiro is celebrating its quatercentenary in 1965 off and on all year.

It began at New Year’s midnight, or even a few hours before. There had been a superb parade of bands and dancers down the Avenida Getúlia Vargas in the center of the city before — at the stroke of 12 (Rio time) — Pope Paul VI touched a button in the Vatican and illuminated, with a new set of floodlamps, the figure of Christ the Redeemer that overlooks the city from atop Corcovado Mountain. Air Force planes flew overhead, dropping “silver rain” of bits of foil painted with the name of the State Bank.

That was also the night of Yemanjá, Goddess of the Sea, and her worshipers crowded Copacabana and the other beaches. Cabalistic-patterned trenches had been dug at high-water line and thousands of white candles set in them. The sand was strewn with white flowers, mostly lilies, and quantities of “white” alcohol, called cachaça, were drunk. Lines of girls and women, all in white, holding hands, and men in white, singly, waded into the surf singing hymns to Yemanjá and throwing their sheaves of flowers out as far as they could.

All together, the city’s activities were a completely Cariocan — that is to say, a Rio de Janeiran — mixture: Latin and African, Catholic and pagan; mildly military, with a touch of progress; a bit disorganized, but with a great deal of unexpected beauty.

* * *

Now the year’s biggest festival — Carnival, the four days preceding Ash Wednesday — has come and gone. As always, the first night, Saturday, was devoted to fancy-dress balls, with the most ostentatious being held at the Municipal Theater. These balls are really costume competitions. No expense is spared, and the winners are invariably dressed in the height of extravagant bad taste.

On Sunday night came the parades of dancers — first, the frêvos, in a wild, crouching dance from the north, then the dozens of samba “schools,” each with hundreds of members in green and pink, silver and blue, red and white. In the tradition of Carnival, the parades lasted all night (and it should be remembered that this is the rainy season in Rio), with the best schools saved to the last, bravely dancing down the avenue at sunrise.

Tuesday night brought the ranchos, huge allegorical floats, many of them mechanized with revolving wheels, opening flowers and giants with rolling eyes. This year, in honor of the quatercentenary, many depicted real or imaginary scenes from Rio’s history.

Through all this no work was done. Public buildings, banks and shops all were closed. Though it is now the fashion for the wealthier and more sophisticated to leave Rio during Carnival, the streets were packed each night. By day, the population recuperated at home. Yet there was remarkably little drunkenness or disorder. This year, the traditional perfume throwers, flasks that shoot a fine jet of scented ether, giving a smart shock and a sensation of icy cold on the skin, were officially banned as dangerous. They had been banned before — with equally little effect.

* * *

Visitors to Rio de Janeiro usually exclaim: “What a beautiful city.” But sooner or later, the more thoughtful are likely to say: “No, it’s not a beautiful city; it’s just the world’s most beautiful setting for a city.”

Guanabara Bay is one of the largest landlocked harbors in the world, and many travelers say it is the most beautiful. Sharp granite peaks rise around it almost directly from the water in a series of fantastic shapes that suggested rather simple names to the Portuguese mariners who first came here: Sugar Loaf, Crow’s-nest, Rudder, Two Brothers, Hunchback (or Corcovado).

Because the mountains are so close to the ocean the moisture in the sea winds condenses quickly and clouds float unusually low about them. This makes for considerable humidity; fussy people complain that their silver tarnishes quickly and their shoes mildew in the closets. But the dampness also gives a softness to the atmosphere that is one of Rio’s charms. Although distant objects are clear they are bathed in a pink or bluish light — dreamy and delicate.

The granite peaks still bear all manner of tropical vegetation. Lianas hang from them, and wild palms wave on their tops — between and over city blocks — with a romantic effect unlike that of any other city.

Beautiful as it is, this setting does not lend itself to city planning. For 400 years, the city has probed slowly between the peaks in every direction — until it has grown like a lopsided starfish.

* * *

As in most capital cities (of which Rio was one until the capital was moved to the newly constructed Brasília in 1960), most of the population seems to come from somewhere else. The very poorest Brazilians — those from the north and northeast — have arrived in increasing numbers for 20 years or more. Now they come packed in old buses or in trucks filled with benches called arraras (“macaw perches”).

Some find work; some are unemployed. Some move on. But very, very few go home, because city life — wretched as it may be — is still more diverting and satisfying than life in the dead little towns or villages they come from.

These people swell the sad and notorious Rio favelas (slums). More ambitious and prosperous people, bright young men seeking university degrees, young bureaucrats and politicians also flock to Rio. Many of the “real” Cariocas themselves are Cariocas from only one or two generations back — when the family left the old fazenda (or estate) and moved to the city for good.

Even if São Paulo is now a much bigger and richer city, many intellectuals prefer to live in Rio. It is still at least the intellectual capital of the country. In its extremes of wealth and poverty, it mirrors the inflation brought on by former President Juscelino Kubitschek’s breakneck drive for industrialization, and by the graft that flourished under both him and his successor, João Goulart. It is a city that reflects the uncertainties of the entire nation since an army coup last March and April ousted Goulart and installed Marshal Humberto Castelo Branco as President. Finally, after 400 years, it is a city that has grown shabby.

There has been a “Paint Rio” campaign, with photographs in the newspapers of the presidents of paint companies handing gallons of free paint to the mother superiors of orphan asylums. House cleaning is needed badly; even the reputedly glamorous section of Copacabana is full of stained and peeling 10-story apartment houses.

Some parts of the city have new street signs, also badly needed. These light at night, helpfully, because Rio is a very dim city these days, but they bear advertisements as well as street names, and are criticized for being commercial and in bad taste.

In contrast to the general decrepitude, there is the brand-new Flamengo Park, with a new beach, gardens, an outdoor bandstand and dance floor, a marionette theater and rides for children. It is by far the city’s best birthday present to its citizens, and although it is only about three-quarters finished, the citizens are embracing it by tens of thousands.

Flamengo Park is narrow, but almost 4 miles long, reaching from the edge of the commercial section of the city southwest along Guanabara Bay. It now looks like a green tropical atoll just risen from the water, but it is really the result of three years’ hard work on an unpromising, hideous stretch of mud, dust, pipes and highways long known as “the fill.” It is the one esthetic contribution of Gov. Carlos Lacerda’s administration of the city and its suburbs.

Most of the beaches have been refurbished a little. Copacabana has just had its lifeguard “posts” taken down — as suddenly as landmarks vanish in New York. For years, Cariocans have said: “I live between posto three and posto four,” or: “Meet me at posto six,” and it will seem strange not to have these points of reference any more.

* * *

Because of the quatercentenary, hotels have been booked solid by out-of-town Brazilians and tourists. Elderly American ladies in print dresses and sunglasses walk the mosaic sidewalks determinedly, looking for something to do. The trouble is, there isn’t anything to do or not much. Rio is not really ready for large-scale tourismo. The bon mot of the moment is to refer to the 4th Centenário as the 4th Sem Ter Nada. Spoken fast, they sound much alike, but the second phrase means “without a thing.” Meanwhile, two or three luxury liners arrive every week with more tourists.

A sight-seeing boat has been launched, something Rio has long needed, since its greatest attraction is still that fabulous bay and its islands. Eight gondolas are being built for the Lagoon, a large, enclosed body of water south of the city. According to the papers, these are “copied exactly from a bronze model Governor Lacerda brought from Italy,” and will have “red velvet awnings.” Provision has been made for outboard motors, too, in case it gets too hot for rowing. Two new cable cars are about to start making the trip to the top of the Sugar Loaf and back. Again according to the papers, the “visibility” will be better from these than from the old ones. This is hard to believe: How could that panorama be improved?

* * *

Although the pace of city life increases constantly, there is still time to stand and stare in Rio. Men linger in groups in downtown cafés or at newsstands to discuss the latest political moves or look at the passing girls. Visitors are always surprised at how many men who would be — in Henry James’s word—“downtown” in New York are on the beaches at 10 o’clock on weekday mornings. This does not mean that Cariocans do not work hard when they work. They just go about it differently.

There is, in fact, much moonlighting. With the present inflation, it is hard to see how workers or the middle class could make ends meet if it were not that everyone down to the humblest nursemaid and lottery-ticket seller did not have some little “business” going on on the side.

* * *

There was some talk of having Carnival for a whole week, in honor of the quatercentenary, instead of just the usual four days, but even Rio finally quailed at the thought and the idea was dropped. But Carnival sambas were in the air for weeks in advance; each night, groups went singing and dancing through the streets with their drums, rehearsing. Traffic would stop, or edge around them, and little boys tag along. No Cariocan can resist that rhythm: The cook sambas in the kitchen, and the guests in the sala move to it unconsciously (the word is rebolar) as they go on with the conversation.

The sambas, marchas and other Carnival songs are the living poetry of poor Cariocans. (The words “rich” and “poor” are still in use here, out of style as they are in the affluent parts of the world.) Their songs have always been made from whatever happened to be on their minds: obsessions, fads, fancies and grievances; love, poverty, drink and politics; their love for Rio, but also Rio’s three perennial problems: water, light, and transportation. As an old samba says:

Rio de Janeiro,

My joy and my delight!

By day I have no water,

By night I have no light.

One of this year’s sambas gives the honest reaction of the masses to last spring’s “revolution”:

Kick him out of office!

He’s a greedy boy!

I’ve nothing to investigate,

What I want is joy!

Justice has arrived!

“Pull” won’t work again!

Some have fled to Uruguay;

Some have fled to Spain!

And here is this year’s version of the annual complaint about the Central Railroad, the line that carries thousands from the huge working-class suburbs north of the city in to work. It is addressed to President Castelo Branco:

Marshál, Illustrious Marshál,

Consider the problem

Of the suburbs on the Centrál!

I’m sorry for poor Juvenal,

Hanging in the old Central

All year long …

He works in Leblon

And lives in Delight,*

And gets to work mornings

Late at night.

Marshál!

Because of its difficult, if lively, topography, the traffic problems of Rio are even more of a nightmare than those of other big cities. Governor Lacerda appointed a tough air force man, Colonel Fontenelle, to see if he could solve them. First, to everyone’s confusion and rage, he changed the direction of almost all the one-way streets: then he attacked double, triple and, some swear, quadruple parking. His system is simple: The police go around letting the air out of the tires of illegally parked cars.

It must be said that this measure, considered much too “hard” by the easy-going Cariocans, has partly succeeded. Anyway, bus travel in the city has been speeded up. This year at least three sambas refer to Colonel Fontenelle’s campaign (with appropriate noises). The odd thing is that these sambas were composed, and are mostly sung (and hissed), by those who have never owned cars in their lives and never expect to.

The words of sambas are nothing without the music, and some of the longest-lived and musically most beautiful have the most hackneyed lyrics. Love — light love and serious love — infidelity, prostitution, police raids and line-ups (the subject of a very pretty one this year), moonlight, beaches, kisses, heartbreak, and love again:

Come, my mulatta,

Take me back.

You’re the joker

In my pack,

The prune in my pudding,

Pepper in my pie,

My package of peanuts,

The moon in my sky.

How much longer the samba can hold out against commercialism, television and radio is impossible to say; there are already signs of deterioration. Especially deadly is the new practice of broadcasting sambas over loudspeakers during Carnival itself, so that the people don’t, or can’t, sing them the way they used to.

Ironically, what may prove to be the real kiss of death to the spontaneity of the samba is that the young rich, after years of devotion to North American jazz, have discovered it. A few years ago only the very few Brazilians, mostly intellectuals, who cared for their own folk-culture took the samba seriously, or went to the rehearsals of the big schools up on the morros, the hills. This year, crowds of young people went, one of the symptoms, possibly, of a new social awareness since the “revolution.” And some of this year’s crop of songs show a self-consciousness, even a self-pity, that is far removed from the old samba spirit.

* * *

Poets are also taking up popular songs, inspired perhaps by Vinicius de Moraes, who wrote the libretto of the movie “Black Orpheus.” He has lately been appearing at a nightclub, Zumzumzum (Rumor), singing his own songs. A young imitator of Yevtushenko, from the south of Brazil, declaimed his poetry to a packed house in Rio, wearing red sweater, white trousers and no socks, with his hair in his eyes. His book is called “The Betrayed Generation.” In fact, a conviction, more or less clearly defined, and more or less justifiable, of “betrayal” seems to be the attitude of both rich and poor, while for the younger rich, a slight subversiveness is considered chic. The Little Castle is a new night club out on Ipanema Beach, and its rich young clientele are often called the “Castelinho Communists”—or parlor pinks.

* * *

The most popular show for many weeks has been “Opinion,” named for the samba “Opinion,” by Zé Kéti, a Negro song writer from the favelas. The cast consists of Nara Leão, one of the first girl singers of “good family” ever to appear in Rio, who represents the repentant uppercrust; Zé Kéti himself, who represents the favelas; and a young Negro from the north, João Batista do Vale, representing the alienated worker who comes to the big city. The three meet, tell their stories, sing, wander about, sit on crates, etc., to the accompaniment of drums, a flute and a guitar. Joan Baez and Pete Seeger are popular now, and so some rather irrelevant North American spirituals and chain-gang songs are included. The death sentence of Tiradentes, “Toothpuller,” the national hero who was condemned for rebellion against Portugal in 1792, is read aloud. There are jokes like: “Red? That color’s out of style now.”

What is depressing about “Opinion” to North Americans in the audience is not its vague “message” (considered daringly left in Rio) or its amateurishness (that is rather endearing). It is the sudden, sad, uncanny feeling of déjà vu: it is all so reminiscent of college plays in the early thirties with Kentucky miners, clenched fists and awkward stances.

Other plays go on as usual. Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” is one, and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” has been running a long time. There is Goldoni’s “Mirandolina,” and, more typically, plays like “The Moral of Adultery,” “Let’s Fall in Love in Cabo Frio” and “The Nuder the Better.” In general, the theater in Rio is far behind the other arts, and acting is in a sort of historical “pocket,” miraculously preserved from about 1910.

The question always in the air is: When are elections to be held? At first they were to be this year; now they have been postponed until 1966, and no one knows the date, or year, for sure. Carlos Lacerda is the only Presidential candidate so far. Ex-President Kubitschek is in self-imposed exile — mostly in Paris — with his political rights taken away for 10 years.

If his followers could find a way of getting around that, he would probably be only too glad to run again. Although his enemies blame the worst of the inflation on Kubitschek’s industrial-progress-at-any-cost policy, and his building of Brasília, and believe his Government to have been hopelessly graft ridden, nevertheless they agree he did get things done. And his many partisans, particularly those who grew rich during his term, are eager to get him back.

Pro-Kubitschek propaganda has reached a height of absurdity. Poor, poor Kubitschek, it goes, he lives in a small apartment in Paris, he drives his own car, and — worst deprivation of all to the family-minded Brazilians — he hasn’t seen his latest grandchild yet. His enemies have given this movement the very Cariocan name of “Operation Coitadinho,” a splendid example of the diminutive of coitado, “poor little one,” one of the most frequent exclamations on the lips of the soft-hearted, but ironical, Brazilians.

Many people were disappointed when President Castelo Branco announced that he would not run for a full term. They had hoped he would, or at least felt it was too early for him to make such a decision. He has almost no demagogic appeal for the masses, and he has not attempted to cultivate it. He is a sad man, still mourning his wife, who died the year before he became President, and he works hard at the almost impossible job he was reluctant to accept.

He has always been respected; now there seems to be a growing admiration and fondness for him. His unfailing dignity, refusal to play politics or make promises and fine speeches, his preference for appealing to law in emergencies, rather than to emotions — all are something new in Brazil, and a welcome relief after the hysterical atmosphere of the past few years.

The press is free, if wildly inaccurate and frequently libelous, and political arrests, which flourished after last spring’s coup, have almost ceased. Talk about police and army brutality and torture has died down, and one can only hope that what Brazilians felt was a national disgrace has been really cracked down on, hard, at last.

* * *

Inflation produces an atmosphere unlike any other. It is felt even in the way money is handled: tired old bills wadded into big balls. Bus conductors neither give nor expect exact change any more; there is no change. Shopkeepers give the customer’s child a piece of candy, instead. Taxi fares have gone up so many times that the meters are several adjustments behind. At the moment, the fare is twice what the meter says, in the day-time. After dark, it is more or less what the driver says.

In Rio, the inflation has almost lost its power to shock; at least, people no longer talk about it constantly the way they did a year or so ago. The minimum wage has gone up and up, but never quite enough. The poor take the inflation more stoically than any other class, since they have never had any savings to lose, anyway. Some of the rich are undoubtedly getting richer. It is the very small middle class that feels the pinch the most. All eyes are fixed on the movements of the dollar, as on a sort of North Star, and the mood might be described as numb, but slightly more hopeful than it was.

For the first time, the Brazilian Government is adhering to a scheme of economic planning; there has been a renewed flow of foreign capital and the pace of inflation has certainly slowed. The prices of gasoline and bread are way up, because the Government has taken away their former impossibly high subsidies. Fighting inflation has to be done slowly and cautiously in Brazil. Because of the ignorance and the high illiteracy rate — and the longstanding skepticism as well — no strong measure against inflation can be explained to the people. The Government does not dare stop public-works projects, even though they are draining the Treasury; that would be considered too “hard.” Wages and prices will go on rising yet a while, although they are supposed to level off this year.

* * *

But in spite of the shabbiness, the shortages, the sudden disconcerting changes for the worse in standard products and the inflation, life in Rio has compensations. Carnival is gone, but next will come St. John’s Day, the second-best holiday of the year; then St. Peter’s Day. For highbrows, a large exhibition of contemporary French painting will arrive in July, in honor of the quatercentenary, and later Spain is sending a ballet and an opera by de Falla. There is also to be a series of concerts of the compositions of Father José Mauricio, the 18th-century Rio de Janeiran priest-composer.

Far more enduring and important than these small treats, in what is now essentially a provincial city, is another compensation for those who have to put up with the difficulties of life in Rio. One example will make it plain. Recently a large advertisement showed a young Negro cook, overcome by her pleasure in having a new gas stove, leaning across it toward her white mistress, who leaned over from her side of the stove as they kissed each other on the cheek.

Granted that the situation is not utopian, socially speaking, and that the advertisement is silly — but could it have appeared on billboards, or in the newspapers, in Atlanta, Ga., or even in New York? In Rio, it went absolutely unremarked on, one way or the other.

1965

Gallery Note for Wesley Wehr

I have seen Mr. Wehr open his battered brief-case (with the broken zipper) at a table in a crowded, steamy coffee-shop, and deal out his latest paintings, carefully encased in plastic until they are framed, like a set of magic playing cards. The people at his table would fall silent and stare at these small, beautiful pictures, far off into space and coolness: the coldness of the Pacific Northwest coast in the winter, its different coldness in the summer. So much space, so much air, such distances and loneliness, on those flat little cards. One could almost make out the moon behind the clouds, but not quite; the snow had worn off the low hills almost showing last year’s withered grasses; the white line of surf was visible but quiet, almost a mile away. Then Mr. Wehr would whisk all that space, silence, peace, and privacy back into his brief-case again. He once remarked that he would like to be able to carry a whole exhibition in his pockets.

It is a great relief to see a small work of art these days. The Chinese unrolled their precious scroll-paintings to show their friends, bit by bit; the Persians passed their miniatures about from hand to hand; many of Klee’s or Bissier’s paintings are hand-size. Why shouldn’t we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music (Mr. Wehr was originally a composer, and I think I detect the influence of Webern on his painting), some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world? But in spite of their size, no one could say that these pictures are “small-scale.”

Mr. Wehr works at night, I was told, with his waxes and pigments, while his cat rolls crayons about on the floor. But the observation of nature is always accurate; the beaches, the moonlight nights, look just like this. Some pictures may remind one of agates, the form called “[illegible]”; Mr. Wehr is also a collector of agates, of all kinds of stones, pebbles, semi-precious jewels, fossilized clams with opals adhering to them, bits of amber, shells, examples of hand-writing, illegible signatures — those small things that are occasionally capable of overwhelming with a chilling sensation of time and space.

He once told me that Rothko had been an influence on him, to which I replied, “Yes, but Rothko in a whisper.” Who does not feel a sense of release, of calm and quiet, in looking at these little pieces of our vast and ancient world that one can actually hold in the palm of one’s hand?

1967

An Inadequate Tribute

Randall Jarrell was difficult, touchy, and oversensitive to criticism. He was also a marvelous conversationalist, brilliantly funny, a fine poet, and the best and most generous critic of poetry I have known. I am proud to remember that, although we could rarely meet, we remained friends for twenty years. Sometimes we quarreled, silently, in infrequent letters, but each time we met we would tell each other that it had meant nothing at all; we really were in agreement about everything that mattered.

He always seemed more alive than other people, as if constantly tuned up to the concert pitch that most people, including poets, can maintain only for short and fortunate stretches.

I like to think of him as I saw him once after we had gone swimming together on Cape Cod; wearing only bathing trunks and a very queer straw cap with a big visor, seated on the crest of a high sand dune, writing in a notebook. It was a bright and dazzling day. Randall looked small and rather delicate, but bright and dazzling, too. I felt quite sure that whatever he was writing would be bound to share the characteristics of the day and of the small man writing away so busily in the middle of it all.

1967

Introduction to An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry

edited by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil

Poets and poetry are highly thought of in Brazil. Among men, the name of “poet” is sometimes used as a compliment or term of affection, even if the person referred to is a businessman or politician, not a poet at all. One of the most famous twentieth-century Brazilian poets, Manuel Bandeira, was presented with a permanent parking space in front of his apartment house in Rio de Janeiro, with an enamelled sign POETA — although he never owned a car and didn’t know how to drive. When he was quite old, Bandeira taught for a few years at the University of Brazil, reaching retirement age long before he had taught the number of years necessary for a pension. Nevertheless, the Chamber of Deputies, to great applause, unanimously voted to grant him a full pension.

Almost anyone — (any man, that is, for until very recently poetry has been exclusively a masculine art in Brazil) — with literary interests has published at least one book of poems, “anyone” including doctors, lawyers, engineers, and followers of other arts. Jorge de Lima was a painter and a well-known Rio doctor as well as a poet. Candido Portinari, the painter best known outside Brazil, wrote autobiographical poems and published a book of them shortly before he died. The doings and sayings of popular poets like Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Vinicius de Moraes are constantly and affectionately reported in the newspapers. In the United States only a Pound or a Ginsberg receives as much attention from the press, but for different reasons and in different tones. Poets who produce volumes after long intervals of silence are called “Leap Year Poets,” Bissextos; Bandeira edited an anthology of contemporary “Leap Year” poets, showing that although their output may be small, they are esteemed and not forgotten.

It does not follow, of course, that the poetry in the many small volumes is necessarily great or even good, or that poetry is any more welcomed by publishers or sells any better in Brazil than in the United States. Editions are very small, of three hundred copies, for example; books are paperbound, as in France, and so cost comparatively little; and the poet earns very little from them. It may seem to the American visitor that the educated people whom he meets in Brazil read more poetry and know more poetry (often by heart) than people in the same walks of life at home. But it should be remembered that the educated elite is still a very small class, living almost entirely in five or six of the larger coastal cities, and that in a country of widespread illiteracy (forty per cent the figure usually given), the potential book-reading, book-buying public is limited. Partly because of poor communications, literary groups in these larger cities are more isolated from each other than they are in the United States — where so much has been made of the “isolation of the artist.” And if anything, Brazilian poets have a harder time making a living than do poets in the United States. There are few reviews and magazines, and these pay next to nothing. The fellowships, awards, readings, and “poet-in-residence” academic posts that help along poetic careers in North America are almost non-existent there.

Poets work in the civil service: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, usually considered the greatest living Brazilian poet, had worked for the Ministry of Education for more than thirty years when he retired in 1966. A few teach, and more go into journalism, sometimes writing columns for newspapers or picture magazines. Since his retirement, Drummond de Andrade has had a regular column of news comment and trivia in a leading Rio paper; occasionally he uses it to publish a new poem. But no matter how he earns his living, there is respect for the poet, his work, and his opinions, and for the more worldly and better connected there is opportunity in the long Latin tradition of appointing poets to diplomatic posts, even as ambassadors. Like Claudel and St.-John Perse in France, Gabriela Mistral and Neruda in Chile, Vinicius de Moraes and João Cabral de Melo Neto, among others in Brazil, have held diplomatic posts. Vinicius de Moraes (commonly known as just “Vinicius”), famous for his film-script for Black Orpheus and more recently for his popular songs, performs in night-clubs, produces musical shows in Brazil and other countries, and makes recordings in Europe — all ways of augmenting his income.

* * *

This anthology, consisting of selections from the work of fourteen poets of the modern generation and of the post-war generation of 1945, is a modest attempt to present to the American reader examples of the poetry written in Brazil during this century. Inevitably, it is more representative of the editors’ personal tastes than all-inclusive. With a population of some ninety million, Brazil is by far the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world, but Portuguese is a relatively unknown language in the United States. It is understandably hard to find good American poets willing to undertake translation, much of which necessarily has to be done from literal prose translations of the Brazilian poems. The editors feel that the translators have done extremely well, keeping close to the texts and yet managing to produce “poems” preserving many of the characteristics of the originals.

Grammatically, Portuguese is a difficult language. Even well-educated Brazilians worry about writing it, and will ask friends to check their manuscripts for grammatical errors. Brazilians do not speak the way they write; the written language is more formal and somewhat cumbersome. In fact, Portuguese is an older language than Spanish, and still retains in its structure Latin forms dating from the Roman Republic. The tendency in this century has been to get away from the old, correct written style, in both prose and poetry, and to write demotic Portuguese. But this has not been completely realized, and Portuguese is still rarely written as it is spoken. A few novelists come close, in passages of conversation, and some columnists and younger poets use slang, gíria, almost unintelligible and changing constantly. One of the goals of the famous “Modern Art Week” in São Paulo in 1922 was to abandon the dead literary language of the nineteenth century and to write poetry in the spoken language. Much poetry of the ’20s attempted this, using slang, abbreviations, ellipses, and apostrophes to indicate letters or syllables left out in ordinary, rapid speech. Very much the same thing had happened in English poetry about a decade earlier. Perhaps it is a recurring phenomenon, desire, or ideal in modern literature. This style in poetry later declined with “the generation of ’45,” and poetry of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, visually at least, is more conventional than those first, early attempts at modernism.

Like other Latin languages, Portuguese has a high number of perfect rhymes and frequent, inescapable assonances. The ease of rhyming in these languages has been envied, sometimes eyed with suspicion, by poets writing in the more obdurate English. But facile rhyme and inevitable assonance can become liabilities, handicaps to originality. With time familiar sets of rhymes grow tiresome, and free verse must have come as a great relief. Almost all the poems in this volume are in free verse or unrhymed metrical verse, but since assonance is innate, many contemporary poets make deliberate use of it to give effects of near-rhyme, casually or in regular patterns. Brazilian poetry, even free verse, can rarely avoid melodiousness, even when the sense might seem to want to do so.

The rules of versification in traditional Portuguese verse are like those of French verse: short and long syllables determine the number of feet in a line, not stress, as in English; and no irregularities in meter are permitted. When contemporary Brazilian poets write in traditional forms (as does Vinicius de Moraes in most of his Sonnets) they obey these rules of versification. Punctuation in modern Brazilian poetry is often puzzling. Apparently, the poets are influenced by, or perhaps simply copy, French usage: no punctuation at all except one stop at the end of the poem; sets of dashes where English poetry might use commas or semi-colons; dashes instead of quotation marks, and so on. In fact, anyone reading Brazilian Portuguese, prose or verse, soon becomes aware of its unperturbed inconsistency in both punctuation and spelling; points of style that have become fixed in English have not yet jelled in Brazil. It resembles our own language in its freer, earlier days. In these translations, the original punctuation has been retained when possible, and only tampered with when it, or the lack of it, might confuse the English-reading reader.

Brazilian poetry cannot be considered truly Brazilian — that is, independent of that of Portugal — until after the Proclamation of Independence in 1822. Its development is more or less predictable, in that its movements parallel those of western Europe, especially France, with a time-lag of ten, twenty, or more years. As in American writing, this time-lag has decreased over the years, growing always shorter, until at present sometimes Brazilian poetry actually seems more advanced than that of the countries it formerly derived from. As in American poetry, there are exceptions to this, apparent regressions in the modernist movement, but none happens to come within the period covered by this volume. There is no space in this brief introduction to give a history of Brazilian poetry over the last hundred fifty years. We shall merely give the highlights, naming a few outstanding poets and their books and briefly outlining the movements that make up the Brazilian heritage of the fourteen poets represented.

* * *

The nineteenth century was, as elsewhere, the romantic century, and Brazilian Romanticism is considered to have started with the publication of a book of poems by Gonçalves Magalhães (1811–1882), called, romantically indeed, Poetic Sighs and Longings. The four outstanding romantic poets, however, were: Gonçalves Dias (1823–1864); Álvares de Azevedo (1831–1852); Casimiro de Abreu (1837–1860); and Castro Alves (1847–1871). All four used genuinely Brazilian themes, Gonçalves Dias* romanticising the Brazilian Indian for the first time, and Castro Alves, in his melodramatic poem “The Slave Ship,” being the first poet to protest against the horrors of the slave trade. They and the other poets of the movement were much influenced, by way of France and Portugal, by the English romantics. Saudade, the characteristic Brazilian longing or nostalgia, and plain homesickness appear obsessively in their poems — perhaps because most of these young poets, “of good family,” made the long ocean voyage to study at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, for Brazil had no universities until the late nineteenth century. Several of them died very young, as did Keats and Shelley, usually of tuberculosis. Gonçalves Dias drowned, shipwrecked on his native shore, while returning from Portugal.

The romantic period gave way to a period of realism, called the Parnassian movement (from around 1870 to 1890) and a brief period of Symbolism (1890–1900). The so-called “realists” were strongly influenced by the French Parnassian school of Gauthier, Banville, Lesconte de L’Isle, and Heredia. The most famous poet of this school was Olavo Bilac (1865–1918), three of whose books are Poesias (1888), Poesias Infantis (1904), and Tarde (1919). The Symbolist movement produced one important figure, the black poet Cruz e Souza (1861–1918). German and English romantic poetry were known to the Brazilians, but French literature and philosophy were, and have remained, until very recently, the strongest influences in Brazilian literature and thought. They are still perhaps of primary importance, but English and, even more, American prose and poetry are now rapidly becoming better known. English is now becoming the most important and fashionable foreign language.

From the turn of the century until 1922, Brazilian poetry went through a period of eclecticism, with no one style predominating, reflecting in general the intense nationalism prevalent at the time. In 1912 Oswald de Andrade, later considered the most radical poet of the 1922 movement, returned from Europe with a copy of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. About that time he created a sensation by publishing a poem without rhyme or meter, entitled “Last Ride of a Tubercular through the City by Streetcar.” The subject-matter and tone of poetry were changing, and in 1917, when Manuel Bandeira published his first book Ash of the Hours, the critic João Ribeiro announced that Olavo Bilac, admired for so long, was “now out of date.”

The year 1922 marked the centennial of Brazilian independence. A group of writers and artists, most of whom had lived in Europe, decided to celebrate by holding a festival at which they would present the avant-garde theories they had enthusiastically adopted in Paris and Italy to their artistically backward compatriots. “Modern Art Week” took place in the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo on the 13th, the 15th, and the 17th of February. It has become as much a landmark in Brazilian culture as the New York Armory Show of 1913 is in the culture of the United States.

The night of the 15th was the most dramatic of the three. The poet Menotti del Pichia made a speech presenting the aims of the new artistic movements, summarizing them with these words: “We want light, air, ventilators, airplanes, workers’ demands, idealism, motors, factory smokestacks, blood, speed, dream, in our Art. And may the chugging of an automobile, on the track of two lines of verse, frighten away from poetry the last Homeric god who went on sleeping and dreaming of the flutes of Arcadian shepherds and the divine breasts of Helen, an anachronism in the era of the jazz band and the movie.” Poets and prose writers then read excerpts from their works. The audience took offense, and there followed an uproar of booing, whistling, and shouted insults. Mário de Andrade read from his book Hallucinated City, and later he confessed in a long essay regarding Modern Art Week that he did not know how he had had the courage to face such an audience.

Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), a mulatto from São Paulo, was one of the most important figures in contemporary Brazilian art and literature. A critic, poet, and novelist, he was also one of the very first intellectuals to discover and to become seriously interested in the great untapped resources of Brazilian folklore and popular music. It is hard to think of any form of contemporary artistic activity in Brazil that does not owe a debt to him. In the year of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, 1970, every newspaper and review printed critical studies, biographical essays, and tributes to him, and loving memoirs were written about him as teacher and friend. The vitality of his personality and the wide range of his interests have been of the utmost importance in helping create a richer artistic self-consciousness in Brazil.

The Modernist poetic movement repudiated French and Portuguese influences, and, as in other countries, it rejected the ideas of the Romantics, Parnassians, and Symbolists. It believed in using the material of everyday life, and attempted a complete honesty, bringing the anguish and conflicts of the period into poetry for the first time. The Modernist group originally included, among other poets, Manuel Bandeira, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade. There were also the painters Anita Malfatti and Di Cavalcanti; the sculptor Victor Brecheret, and the composer Villa-Lobos. Only Villa-Lobos is well-known outside Brazil, but the others all took part in the artistic transition from the outworn forms of the nineteenth century to the forms of the present.

In 1924, in Paris, Oswald de Andrade published an important book of poems called Brazilwood. With extreme economy of means, in simple language, he treated Brazilian themes, customs, superstitions, and family life directly, and for the first time in Brazilian poetry humorously. These qualities have marked Brazilian poetry ever since; they represent the real achievement of Modern Art Week and modernismo. A word of tribute should also be given to the French poet Blaise Cendrars, who lived in Brazil for several years. His free style, brilliant imagery, and fresh, ironic treatment of the modern world were all important influences on the poets of the Modernist movement.

* * *

Manuel Bandeira, Mário de Andrade, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade have been mentioned; other poets in the Modernist movement are included in this anthology. Carlos Drummond de Andrade is regarded as the most important — and is probably the most popular — poet of the contemporary period. Vinicius de Moraes is also extremely popular, especially with the younger generation, some of whom are ignorant of his early and more serious work, but adore him for his “Bossa Nova” songs (a style now considered out-of-date), and his present constant outpouring of gentle, romantic songs and music, almost invariably about love.

The most recent date marking a shift in poetic styles in Brazil is 1945, the year of the dropping of the first atomic bomb — about which every Brazilian poet seems to have written at least one poem — and the end of World War II. Brazil itself was just coming to the end of a dictatorship that had lasted for fifteen years and was passing through a phase of redemocratization. It was the year of the death of Mário de Andrade, and a new generation of poets was appearing on the scene, the Neo-Modernists, or the generation of ’45. As early as 1929 the writer Luis Martins had remarked: “Modernism suffered from the demoralizing influence of its adherents. As in the time of Parnassianism everyone wrote sonnets, in the time of Modernism everyone began to write nonsense in free verse.” The generation of ’45 was against the exaggerated use of the free verse that had dominated poetry for more than twenty years; they wanted more concision and less sentimentality (always a danger in Brazilian verse) as well as a more accurate use of words.

João Cabral de Melo Neto, born in 1920, came of age in this generation; today he is considered one of the major poetic voices in Latin America. His first book Stone of Sleep (1942) showed the characteristics of his mature style: striking visual imagery and an insistent use of concrete, tactile nouns. He is “difficult”; but at the present time his work displays the highest development and the greatest coherency of style of any Brazilian poet.

The younger poets, many, diverse, and talented, including the Concretionists and others whose work takes the form of song lyrics — and Brazil has produced in recent years some of the best popular songs ever written — are not in this anthology. The editors hope to introduce them in a second volume, in order to give the American reader a more complete picture of the variety, profundity, and originality of Brazilian poetry today.

The Editors

1972

A Brief Reminiscence and a Brief Tribute

I had hoped that this photograph, so unflattering to almost everyone in it, would never be seen again. The occasion was a party for Edith and Osbert Sitwell, given by LIFE Magazine, at the Gotham Bookmart. I hadn’t wanted to attend, but Marianne Moore was firm about it. “We must be polite to the Sitwells,” she said, and so I went. There were a great many people there. The photographers, as is their custom, were not polite. There were difficulties in separating the poets from the non-poets (some of whom wanted to be in the picture, too) and in herding the poets into the back room to be photographed. (In the fray, a few got left out.) Poets tripped over trailing wires and jostled each other to get in the front row, or in the back row, depending. They were arranged, hectored, and re-arranged. Miss Moore’s hat was considered to be too big: she refused to remove it. Auden was one of the few who seemed to be enjoying himself. He got into the picture by climbing on a ladder, where he sat making loud, cheerful comments over our heads.

The picture was taken with a sort of semi-circular swoop of the camera, with two hesitations and clicks. The poets at the clicks (I was one) came out looking rather odd. (Seeing the picture in LIFE, one of my best friends told me I looked like a salt-cellar with the top screwed on the wrong way.) I was wearing a small velvet cap and after the party Miss Moore said regretfully, “I wish I’d worn a minimal hat like that.”

* * *

I met Auden only a few times, and although I wanted to, I was a little afraid of talking to him. I regret this now very much. I find it sad that the young students and poets I have met in the past four years usually seem to know only a few of his anthology pieces, rarely read him at all, and apparently never for pleasure. One reason for this may be that Auden, the most brilliant of imitators himself, has been, or was, so much imitated that his style, his details and vocabulary, the whole atmosphere of his poetry, seems overfamiliar, old hat. But when I was in college, and all through the thirties and forties, I and all my friends who were interested in poetry read him constantly. We hurried to see his latest poem or book, and either wrote as much like him as possible, or tried hard not to. His then leftist politics, his ominous landscape, his intimations of betrayed loves, war on its way, disasters and death, matched exactly the mood of our late-depression and post-depression youth. We admired his apparent toughness, his sexual courage — actually more honest than Ginsberg’s, say, is now, while still giving expression to technically dazzling poetry. Even the most hermetic early poems gave us the feeling that here was someone who knew—about psychology, geology, birds, love, the evils of capitalism — what have you? They colored our air and made us feel tough, ready, and in the know, too.

I almost always agree with Auden critically, except when he gets bogged down in his categories (and except that I haven’t yet been able to read Tolkien), and I admire almost all his poems except the later preachy ones. I’d like to quote some characteristic lines:

Doom is darker and deeper than any sea-dingle.

*

Easily my dear, you move, easily your head,

And easily as through the leaves of a photograph album I’m led

Through the night’s delights and the day’s impressions,

Past the tall tenements and the trees in the wood,

Though sombre the sixteen skies of Europe

And the Danube flood.

*

We made all possible preparations,

Drew up a list of firms,

Constantly revised our calculations

And allotted the farms …

*

For to be held for friend

By an undeveloped mind

To be joke for children is

Death’s happiness

Whose anecdotes betray

His favorite color as blue

Colour of distant bells

And boys’ overalls.

*

Now the leaves are falling fast,

Nurse’s flowers will not last;

Nurses to the graves are gone,

And the prams go rolling on.

*

From SPAIN, 1937

Many have heard it on the remote peninsulas,

On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fisherman’s islands,

In the corrupt heart of the city;

Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch

Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;

They floated over the oceans;

They walked the passes; they came to present their lives.

*

From REFUGEE BLUES

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,

Saw a door opened and a cat let in;

But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, they weren’t German Jews.

Went down to the harbour and stood upon the quay,

Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:

Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;

They had no politicians and sang at their ease:

They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

These verses and many, many more of Auden’s have been part of my mind for years — I could say, part of my life.

1974