Literary branding in Lisbon and Lyon

In Lisbon, where I vacationed recently, images of Fernando Pessoa were everywhere, in street art, on mugs and shirts and puzzles, even on books.  This lovely tile example is near the Pantheon, overseeing the Saturday flea market where I bought my own Pessoa souvenir, a €1 tile with the image of Pessoa used on the cover of one of the many Richard Zenith translations.  There were three different Pessoa tiles available.  That seems like a lot to me.

Maybe it is not.  Maybe more cities than I know use once-obscure Modernist writers as their mascot, as their brand.  Kafka in Prague.  Others?  There should be others.  The portrait of Pessoa amounts to a moustache, glasses, and a hat, so it is endlessly flexible and instantly recognizable.  Why is New York City not full of stylized Marianne Moore art?  She wore a distinctive hat.  She was even famous while alive.

Lisbon’s pride in its writers is so great that it was easy to find souvenirs for other writers, the most thorough being a little box meant to contain a tealight; one side of the box had a caricature of Pessoa, of course, and the others had Luís de Camões, José Maria de Eça de Queirós, and José Saramago.  I know that Saramago has had international best-sellers, but it is hard to believe that this is an item for non-Portuguese tourists.  More Eça stuff is visible on the right.

I wondered about Lyon.  It should be more heavily stamped with writers.  The airport is named after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, but images of the Little Prince are rare.  Even this snowy statue of the Prince and the Aviator is almost hidden, a surprise.  Maybe the Little Prince is too expensive.

François Rabelais is public domain.  He was only in Lyon for a few years, working as a doctor in the Hôtel-Dieu, the big Renaissance hospital, and editing humanist texts with his printer friends, but these are also the years that he wrote and published both Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534).  The renovated hospital is about to reopen as a gargantuan International City of Gastronomy, whatever that is, the perfect setting for cartoons of Rabelais, Gargantua, and Pantagruel.

Too openly gluttonous, maybe, and anyway Lyon already has its literary restaurant mascot, the puppet Guignol, created in Lyon in the early 19th century.  Although here he has a popsicle, he is normally carrying a wooden club.  It makes a deeply satisfying thwack against the heads of other puppets.  “Should I hit him [the pirate] again, or has he had enough,” Guignol asked the children at the performance I saw.  Guess how the children responded.  Guignol is a version of Punch, but friendlier and much less weird.

That performance, at La Maison de Guignol, included a surprise guest appearance by another Lyon icon, not exactly literary, although he is responsible for a number of books.  Please see this article in the regional paper Le Progres for the origin of the puppet of Paul Bocuse.  The pirates, in this play, kidnap M. Paul for their ship’s mess, as is logical.  Bocuse had died just a few weeks before we saw the play, which was not stopping anybody.  They even added a line: “You can’t kill me, I’m already dead!”  French theater works fast, and is ruthless.

Images of Paul Bocuse are everywhere in Lyon, is my point.  Maybe they will fade away, but maybe not.  Maybe a hundred years from now, this will be the Platonic ideal of what a chef looks like. He is not a literary character yet, but might become one.  Still, the city’s branders should make room for Rabelais and Gargantua, for the legendary gluttons who swallow of all that great, bold, heavy Lyon food and wine.

through the very fact of his existence - one of Flaubert's saints

As much as Eça de Queirós’s Saint Christopher puzzled me – why did he write this? what is it? – I knew one thing that it was: an imitation of Gustave Flaubert’s short hagiography “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller” (1877), one of the Trois Contes.

Flaubert’s Julian is another medieval saint who has a series of picaresque adventures.  Julian is born to nobility, while Christopher is born to peasants.  Christopher pursues good works ought of a boundless sense of charity while Julian is atoning for a curse.  Both stories end with the saint working as a poor ferryman; both culminate in a final sacrifice, the character’s death, from carrying Christ across the river.

Flaubert’s story is short, twenty of thirty pages, so Eça has lots of room for expansion.  But he pretty well loots Flaubert:

Long rain-spouts, representing dragons with yawning jaws, directed the water towards the cistern, and on each window-sill of the castle a basil or a heliotrope bush bloomed, in painted flower-pots.  (Flaubert)

At the corners of the house, tall, thin-winged dragons turned their wide-open gullets toward the courtyard.  The rainwater would pour through them into the gutters of the cistern.  The lantern of a servant passing through the terrace lit up the thick row of pumpkins set out on the parapet to dry in the sun.  (Eça, 3-4)

Lots of touches like this.  Eça is the great imitator of Flaubert, an imitator of great originality.

I have never really understood Flaubert’s religious fiction.  Luckily, he says, in the last line of the story, why he wrote “The Legend of Julian”:

And this is the story of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, as it is given on the stained-glass window of a church in my birthplace.

Not a word of either quotation about the rain-spouts is necessary to tell the lives of these saints, but Flaubert is trying, with the tools he has, to recreate the beauties of the stained glass that he had admired for as long as he could remember.

The hagiography must have also had a special appeal to Flaubert because it is a genre of great cruelty.  Julian becomes addicted to hunting at a young age, and a frightening, bizarre hunting scene, in which masses of animals seem to approach Julian to be killed, is the source of his curse:

… after he had slain them all, other deer, other stags, other badgers, other peacocks, and jays, blackbirds, foxes, porcupines, polecats, and lynxes, appeared; in fact, a host of beasts that grew more and more numerous with every step he took.  Trembling, and with a look of appeal in their eyes, they gathered around Julian, but he did not stop slaying them; and so intent was he on stretching his bow, drawing his sword and whipping out his knife, that he had little thought for aught else.  He knew that he was hunting in some country since an indefinite time, through the very fact of his existence, as everything seemed to occur with the ease one experiences in dreams.

Quite strange, that last sentence.  Sainthood, for Flaubert, is a frightening condition.  None of this hunting business is actually in the Rouen Cathedral stained glass, as far as I can see.

I read the version of the story in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, third edition, presumably translated by someone; don’t know who.

That’s enough saints for a while.  Like I know from saints.

another Iberian saint - Saint Christopher by Eça de Queirós

One book about sainthood followed by a neighbor, since I was reading José Maria Eça de Queirós’s Saint Christopher (pub. 1912, written in the 1890s) while writing about La Regenta.  The latter is a novel, an attempt to look at the meaning of sainthood in a world resembling the real one.  Saint Christopher is an out and out hagiography.

You may remember – I did – Eça as the author of the savagely anti-clerical The Crime of Padre Amaro and The Relic, an attack on religioushypocrisy.  Or a defense of religious hypocrisy.  The Relic features a long scene in which the narrator, an ordinary fellow of the 19th century, witnesses or hallucinates the Passion of Christ, so Saint Christopher has a predecessor in Eça’s work.  But, still, I do not really understand why he was writing straightforward saints’ lives.  Maybe it is not so straightforward.

The setting is a vague, fantastic medieval Europe.  The saint is a monster, a grotesque, worst at his birth:

Dark, all covered by rough, wrinkled skin, with an empty, shapeless face where the features were formed by vague, lumpy protuberances, the enormous hands clasped over his fuzzy belly, twisted legs that ended in two sharp feet, like those of a faun, all together he had the appearance of a dark root, the root of a strange tree, still dark from the dark earth out of which it had been torn.  And not a cry.  (p. 14)

Christopher gradually becomes more human-like than this, but Eça frequently compare him to animals, plants, and even rocks, and not just physically but mentally.  A saint in this world is not quite human.

Super-strong – another character in the 19th century superhero tradition – and with an endless capacity both for suffering and for charity, Christopher wanders through a series of picaresque adventures, developing his understanding of good and evil.  He serves a boy prince, is exhibited in a circus, becomes a hermit, a nurse in a plague-ridden city, and the leader of a peasant revolt.  His empathy only grows:

Later on, and from out of the depths of his simple and dense soul, there came little by little to be born the idea that the tree also suffered, as did the little flowers in the fields.  And from that time on, Christopher never again carved a shepherd’s crook from out of a tree trunk.  From that time on, all branches that were dry, broken, and lying on the ground pained him and made him suffer.  (130)

Soon his sympathy is extended to rocks:

And many times, with his vast body, he provided shade for the rocks; and during these periods of cold, his hands, working like long spade, would free these same rocks and stones from the icy frigidity that imprisoned them.

A number of episodes at the end of the book, including this one and the most famous one, where he carries the infant Christ across a river – in this telling, the crossing is Christopher’s death – achieve a real sublimity.  Perhaps that is sufficient explanation of Eça’s purpose.

If you are thinking, hey, doesn’t this sound a lot like Flaubert – it does!  You are perceptive and thoughtful.  Let’s turn to Flaubert tomorrow.  I don’t understand Flaubert’s saints, either.

The translation is by Gregory Rabassa and Earl E. Fitz, and was published by Tagus Press just last year.

The Relic's vision - to see this page of the Gospel living before my eyes

Teodorico finds his relic about halfway through The Relic, and then something strange happens.  He has a dream which takes him to the Jerusalem of the distant past, to a particular Easter Day, “to see this page of the Gospel living and sounding before my eyes” (97).  Teodorico is going to witness the trial and death of Jesus Christ.

A dream with this length and specificity is not really a dream, but a vision.  I have been emphasizing the comedy of the novel, but this long episode is not, a few little touches aside, at all funny.  It aims at something like genuine religious awe.  It is also heretical, but that is a point separate from the aesthetic decision to crack the novel apart.  The vision of Jerusalem fills over a third of the novel.  It is not a digression.

The dream world is thickly described:

A slave, his hair bound by a metal diadem, entered carrying a jar filled with warm water smelling of roses, in which I cleansed my hands; another offered me cakes of honey on large vine leaves; another poured out a strong black wine of Emmaus.  And that his guest might not eat alone, Gamaliel cut a slice of pomegranate and with closed eyes raised to his lips a bowl in which pieces of ice floated among orange-flowers…  I lit a cigar and went to stand at the window. (113)

I picked that passage for the cigar as much as anything, one of the anachronisms that slip into the scene to remind us that something ain’t quite right.

All of this description, of food and architecture and perfumes and sunshades made of peacock feathers, remind me that Eça de Queirós is as usual deliberately imitating Gustave Flaubert.  The Relic, or this one part of it, is Eça’s Salammbô, his Hérodias – he even tells his own version of the history of Herod and Salomé and John the Baptist.  That one is the obvious nod, I guess, but compare Eça’s description of the sacrifice of the Passover lambs to Flaubert’s nightmarish human sacrifices to Moloch:

With the constant austere mutter of the sacred ceremonial mingled the bleating of lambs, the tinkling of silver plates, the crackling of wood, the dull thud of wooden hammers, the slow trickling of water into marble vessels and the blare of trumpets.  Despite the aromatic gums kept burning and the long fans of palm leaves which the attendants were waving in the air, I put my handkerchief to my face, overcome by the enervating smell of raw flesh, blood, frying fat and saffron which the Lord required of Moses as the best gift of earth.  (152)

Eça hardly dwells on the cruelty of the sacrifice as much as Flaubert.  His description of Christ’s suffering, for example, is strong but not sadistic.  The great point of the vision is to historicize the life of Christ, to explain and abolish the miracles of the Church.  Teodorico moves from religious awe to human sympathy.  Fortunately, back in the real world it takes him a while for what he learned to sink in, which allows the comedy to return in the last quarter of the book.  The mix of tones, the social comedy and parody combined with the humane spiritual message of the vision, is pretty strange, an is the great mystery of The Relic.

Dwight covers the same chapter.  It is unusual.

Monday is a holiday for me, so no post.

The soothing presentiment that Auntie would soon die and molder in her grave - The Relic takes its hypocrisy on the road

A couple of major jolts to the plot occur about one-seventh of the way into The Relic – the one-seventh mark is not where good novel-writing principle says to put a major turn, but The Relic is a strangely structured novel – and Teodorico learns that in all likelihood his rich Auntie will leave her wealth to the Church, not to him.  He amps up his pious act (“in Auntie’s presence I ascetically drank a glass of water and ate a crust of bread”) between visits to his kept woman (33).  His piety impresses his aunt who offers him – or demands – a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the acquisition of a holy relic.

“What a tremendous bore!  Jerusalem!” (47)  He wanted to go to Paris.  But Teodorico quickly realizes the opportunity at hand as he begins to imagine, what else, the exotic prostitutes.  Teodorico is not just a character in a Portuguese Flaubert novel – he is almost a Portuguese Flaubert.  I occasionally wondered if Eça de Queirós had somehow seen some of Flaubert’s letters from Egypt, the ones about his uninhibited sexual adventures, but that seems impossible, and Teodorico is completely unlike Flaubert in that he is a sentimental sensualist who falls in love with his fling.

The novel now turns into a kind of travel book, although Teodorico, more interested in women than culture or history, is a bad guide.  He barely sees Egypt – barely leaves his new companion’s bedroom.  Jerusalem is mostly the source of complaints:  dirt, boredom, tourist traps.  He does find his relic: a branch of a thorn tree, surely the same kind of tree that supplied Christ’s crown of thorns, possibly even the exact tree, prove that it ain’t.  In a peculiarly Proustian passage a suspicious Teodorico interrogates the tree:

The monster remained dumb, but suddenly I felt within my soul, like the consoling freshness of a summer breeze, the soothing  presentiment that Auntie would soon die and molder in her grave.  The Tree of Thorns, through the general communication of Nature, sent from its sap into my blood the sweet announcement of Dona Patrocinio’s death, as a sufficient promise that none of its branches, when transferred to the oratory, would prevent the horrible old lady’s liver from being the death of her.  (93)

What Teodorico does not realize – as the narrator, writing in retrospect, he must, but he plays dumb – is that 1) the thorn branch is not the first but actually the second relic he has acquired, the first something rather more secular he picked up in Egypt, and 2) the branch, and the other relic, too, are genuinely capable of miracles.  I count three between them (the relics have to cooperate on one of the miracles). 

Miracle # 2 is the final big plot twist, one that is visible many pages earlier and almost painful to see approach, although when I consider that the victim of the twist is the one writing the book the pain of the false tension becomes psychologically interesting.  #3 comes when Teodorico hits bottom, allowing him to Learn His Lesson, not a lesson that I was expecting.  The Relic is essentially pro-hypocrisy:  the right hypocrisy for the right reason.

Then there is Miracle #1.  That’s the wild one.  So that’s tomorrow.

Heavens, what a good smell of church - the hypocrisies of The Relic by Eça de Queirós

I have never read a novel like The Relic, the peculiar 1887 masterpiece by José Maria Eça de Queirós.  It is both one thing and another.  Both things are good.  The meshing of the things is unique.  I would like to think that with some effort I could come up with a more precise word than “things.”

Teodorico is an orphan, now an adult, dependent for everything on his horrible Auntie who is not merely pious but a religious fanatic, while Teodorico is a sensualist.  A sample of awful Auntie:

In her presence the prudent friends of the house had learnt not to mention interesting stories read in the newspapers revealing a love motive, since they scandalized her like a naked offence.  “Padre Pinheiro,” she called out one day furiously with blazing eyes to the luckless priest, on hearing him tell of  a servant girl in France who had thrown her child into a drain.  “Padre Pinheiro, be good enough to respect me.  It is not the drain, it is the child that disgusts me.”  (27)

With Auntie, Teodorico is a hypocrite and liar, waiting for her to die, spending his allowance on operas and a favorite prostitute.  He always goes to Mass before visiting her in the hope that one of Auntie’s friends will observe his devotion.  He carries incense in his pocket and, after an amorous evening:

I would go furtively into the deserted stables at the further end of the courtyard and on the lid of a barrel burn a piece of the holy resin, and remain there bathing in its purifying odor the lapels of my coat and my manly beard.  Then I went up and had the satisfaction of hearing Auntie sniff delightedly and say: “Heavens, what a good smell of church”; and with a modest shrug I would murmur: “It is I, Auntie.” (27)

Much of the comedy of the novel comes from the baldness, the purity of Teodorico’s hypocrisy.  I was on to him, I thought.  Soon he will slip up and reveal that he is The Unreliable Narrator.  But no, he is in fact completely reliable.  Whoever he thinks he is telling his story to – himself, a future reader, who knows – is getting the truth.  The fun, then, is the contrast between the secret truth, which I am in on, and the lie that is the rest of his life.  I’m sure rigging the novel the other way would be fun, too, but this is fine.

This puts me about one-seventh of the way into  the novel.  Maybe I will have to write about it for six more days.

The Relic was reissued a few months ago by Tagus Press; the translation, by Aubrey Bell, is from 1925.  I have no doubt that the more recent Margaret Jull Costa translation is as good or better, but this one is fine.  I had meant to read The Relic back during the Great Portuguese Event, but I had run myself ragged.  My energy has returned, so I’ll spend another day or two, not six, with Eça.

The Portuguese Literature Challenge signoff with many thank-yous

Cruges, after a silence, shrugged and muttered:

“Even if I wrote a good opera, who would put it on?”

“And if Ega wrote a fine book, who would read it?”

The maestro concluded:  “This country is simply impossible.  I think I’ll have a coffee too.”  (The Maias, Ch. VIII, 192)

Now just hang on a minute, pal!  What have I been doing since August if not reading the finest Portuguese books?

When I launched the Portuguese Literature Challenge, I guessed that I would be sick of it all by the end of April.  Pretty close.  Know thyself.  So this is a wrap-up.  I do not have any original insights into Portugal or Brazil or their literatures but I did read a lot of good books in good company.

Although I wandered around plenty, three authors took up most of my time, as they should have.  I have written so much about them that I will limit myself to notes and thank yous.

Machado de Assis.  Shelf Love Jenny joined me for The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.  The last five novels of Machado (I only got to four of them) are uniquely odd and inventive.  My greatest surprise, though, was discovering Machado’s accomplishment as a short story writer.  I came across a critic who credited Machado with “at least sixty world-class masterpieces” of short fiction, which is absurd, but a couple dozen, now that is not absurd at all.  And how often does Machado show up in short story anthologies?  So I understand the special pleading.  I had no idea.  Rise and mel u wrote about Machado’s short stories, and mel’s post has links to posts about some other Brazilian short stories.

Eça de Queirós.  “[E]verything he wrote was enjoyable” says Borges, and with nine of his books behind me I will agree.  His character work is especially good.  Please see Richard and litlove, who both have interesting things to say about The Crime of Father Amaro, and Scott Bailey on The Illustrious House of Ramires.

As good as Eça typically is, though, his best book is clearly The Maias.  Also his longest, by far, sorry, but the length is part of what makes it the best.  The Maias has no more story or plot or characters than Amaro or Cousin Basilio, for example.  Very similar, actually, which likely frustrates some readers.  So the novel is not "epic Eça."  For whatever reason, Eça chose this particular book as his masterpiece and worked on it more.  It has a more complex, multi-layered pattern than the other books.  I am not sure that it is more meaningful than his other novels, but it is more intricate.  It has a higher thread count than his other tapestries.  Not everyone, I know, thinks this means "best."

Fernando Pessoa.  An original, an endless source of puzzles and ideas.  You do not even have to read his work for him to generate ideas, but just read about him and his system of heteronyms.   Please see seraillon for a recent post on The Book of Disquiet and a piece about Antonio Tabucchi and Pessoa.

I also want to thank Miguel of St. Orberose, whose blog and comments here pointed me in all sorts of useful directions.

What should I do next?  Austria, Italy?  19th century plays?  The 1890s?  Maybe too big, that one.  The late 1890s?  19th century literary criticism – but who would want to read along with that?  Mountaineering books?  Old timey kiddie lit?  Ideas welcome.

And thanks again for everyone’s assistance, participation, spurs to thought, and generally enthusiastic attitude.

Tradition and Individual Blogging - the past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past

Ask a graduate student in the humanities – an A(ll)B(ut)D(issertation) is who I really have in mind – what he “does” and you will likely hear something along the lines of “I do 16th century Venetian painting” or “I do 17th century French opera” or “I do 18th century English curate’s diaries.”  If you hear that last one, escape as quickly as you can; you are at risk of being bored into a coma.

Period, language or location, form.  Sometimes the period is replaced by a movement (Romantic), or a sub-period of a century (Restoration, Victorian), or an expansion in time (medieval, early modern).  Once in a blue moon, a human is named (“I do Rembrandt’s landscape drawings”).  An emendation:  I assume, but do not actually know, that 20th centuryist humanities students always subdivide even more (“post-war Austrian post-serialist tone poems”).

I always start with these categories, too.  This is all bedrock information for classifying a work of art.  I place every work in its tradition.  There may be a kind of imaginative freedom in not worrying about any of this, allowing works to fortuitously collide with each other, but the study of an artistic tradition has its own pleasures.  When I wander into a reading project, like Yiddish or Portuguese literature, I am working not just on the texts but the tradition, discovering how writers play with and argue with other people’s texts.  A scholar of, say, the 19th century Portuguese novel has a responsibility to read everything I am reading and then several shelves of books that I cannot read (because not in English) and do not want to read (because not as good as Eça de Queirós*).

I am beginning to sound like T. S. Eliot:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.  His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.  You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.  (“Tradition and Individual Talent”)

Please set aside the words “cannot” and “must” (“Yeah, Stearns? Make me!”).  One of the pleasures of reading Eça de Queirós and Fernando Pessoa and Machado de Assis is that not only are the Portuguese and Brazilian literary traditions intertwined, but these writers were also directly responding to French and English literature.  Eça even made Portugal’s complex cultural relationship with French art one of his recurring themes.

A reader might reasonably wonder if knowledge of Flaubert or Tristram Shandy is then necessary before bothering with The Maias or The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, but the effect is bidirectional.  Reading Sentimental Education affects how I read The Maias, but the reverse will also be true.  The Maias (and Zola and Julian Barnes) changed Flaubert.  Eliot again:

… what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it.  The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them…  the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.

Something similar is true for the reader.  Anthony at Time’s Flow Stemmed is reading about re-reading: “Re-reading a once favourite book is potentially a perilous encounter…  we re-read through the filter of every other book we have part-remembered.”  But reading new books changes the old favorites, too.  I have no doubt that Sentimental Education will look different when I re-read it, but it has already changed enormously since I read it twenty years ago, now that I have read far more in Flaubert’s tradition, both the writers he was responding to and the writers who responded to him.

This is actually a continuation of my question about how to use the word “classic,” although I fear it is a bit oblique.

*  But what of the books that are not in English, but are as good?  Please, do not speak of those!  *sob*

It was a very cordial moment of warm sympathy - why I never wanted to slap the protagonist of this Eça de Queirós novel

One thing I love about book blogs, and about amateur readers, is that they sometimes want to slap fictional characters, or strangle them.  Often Jane Austen characters for some reason.  Fanny Price in particular, which is especially funny, because readers want to slap her because she is inoffensive.  “Why don’t you sass back at your mean aunt?” Smack!  That’ll teach Fanny.*

Ruth Franklin and John Banville never say they want to slap characters when they review books.  I wish they would.  It always makes me laugh, this readerly frustration at characters who are not behaving as they should, which I fear typically means not behaving as sensibly as I would.  As if the story would be better if it were about me and my well-considered, commonsensical actions.

The fun of To the Capital, which spends nearly three hundred pages in the company of an eminently stranglable nitwit, is that the young, idealistic, shallow, weak-willed, talentless dreamer of a protagonist makes the wrong decision almost every time he is offered a choice.  He wants everything, and he wants it in a hurry: literary fame, with the accompanying praise and money and women; access to aristocratic salons, but also a leading role in radical politics, including the overthrow of the monarchy; and all of this without much in the way of work.  Artur’s fantasy sequences, his reveries about his rise to fame, are among the novel’s comic highlights.   I suspect that Eça’s bedrock critique is that Artur wants to be an artist without working to be an artist.

Artur arrives in Lisbon with some money, a lot of money, actually, which makes him a mark for sharpers:

Artur leaned back in satisfaction, pleased to be one of the clique…  Then Meirinho remembered that he ought to ‘stand a round’ with a bottle of champagne, but he quickly added, slapping his leg, that he was joking, it was a humorous remark.  Artur, however, insisted – he wanted to stand a round – and Meirinho at once asked for a bottle of Cliquot.  It was a very cordial moment of warm sympathy.  (125)

The novel would, of course, be much improved if Artur saw through that sponge Meirinho, husbanded his money and got a job as a copyist rather than hanging around with these journalists and writers.

Artur self-publishes his derivative poems to no acclaim (“his book seemed to pass over the city like a drop of water over rubber,” 201), commits a number of absurd social faux pas, including the low comedy of letting a fat woman at a party sit on his top hat, and squanders his remaining money on a Spanish prostitute,  a romance that ends in the only way it could.  So naïve, so stupid.  Yet I never wanted to slap him; I never urged him to make the right choice.  I was enjoying his suffering too much, enjoying Eça’s tour of Lisbon in the company of this all-too-recognizable fool.

I have been using the John Vetch translation of To the Capital.

*  Slap.  Strangle.  Shake, strangle, and hug.  Some of the violence is in the comments, not the body of the post.

His eyes were feasting greedily on the details. - another good Eça de Queirós novel

To the Capital, another posthumous Eça de Queirós novel, this one published in 1925, a quarter century after Eça’s death, that’s the book I want to write about.  It is a fine novel, comparable in style to Eça’s best books, although narrower in conception.  We always stay as close as possible to Artur, a young poet and dreamer, who has the good luck to escape the torpor of the Portuguese countryside for Lisbon, thrilling Lisbon, the capital of everything:  fame, literature, sex, politics, society, fashion, and everything else worth knowing about.  The fact that much of this is imitative of French society, fashion, etc. is part of Eça’s ongoing satire about Portuguese culture.

One piece of the satire is that To the Capital, like The Maias and Cousin Basilio, is partly a parody of a French novel, not of Flaubert this time but Balzac.  Artur arrives in Portugal with two manuscripts, his tickets to literary fame and its traditional perquisites (money, women), a book of poems (Enamels and Jewels, copying Gautier) and a play.  Lucien de Rubempré, the hero of Lost Illusions (1837-43) arrives in Paris from his French village with nothing but a book of his poems and part of a historical novel.  Artur, unlike Lucien, has some money, although it sure goes fast; Lucien has his enormous personal beauty which eventually leads Balzac in a direction the less Romantic Eça would never follow; please see A Harlot High and Low (1838-47) for the crazed details.

Artur agrees with me:

Lisbon! – he visualized the life that filled it, violent and grandiose, like the world of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine; it was from French novels that he reconstructed Lisbon society… he pictured himself sitting in the cafés, between the gilt mirrors, weighing up the buzz of literary discussions; at theatre entrances, he saw a multitude, crowding together, eager for art…  mingled with the mystery of the vast city, he imagined the existence of tormented personalities of romance or of the theatre – Rastignacs tortured by ambition, Vautrins fearlessly hunting lions… (53)

A couple more characters I had to look up because they are not from Balzac follow.  Rastignac and Vautrin actually appear in Lost Illusions, but Artur does not seem to have read it (he presumable knows them from Père Goriot), which makes for a fine joke, that he misses the one novel that could almost be about himself.

I am only going on about Balzac because it is amusing to see what Eça is doing.  Any reader who cares can just look up Rastignac and Artur’s first opera (Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, about Vasco da Gama!) and just get on with the story, or not with the story, exactly, but the scene, like the scene at the opera:

Intimidated by the murmur of voice rising in the auditorium, Artur did not stir.  His eyes were feasting greedily on the details.  And from the lofty position of the boxes, with their rich and shaded hues, from the chandelier with tits ornamental prisms projecting into shaded areas, its varnished contrasts of white and gold, the regal dignity of the tribunal, enclosing with a cherry-coloured velvet curtain between the herculean caryatids of the kings, the style of men’s coats, it all spread like evidence of the grandeur of the capital and the magnificence of the monarchy. (109-10)

And on and on and on like that, wonderfully thick.  Eça is suggesting, perhaps, that I must read his novel like Artur attacks Lisbon, with an appetite for the details.

This cost me fifteen francs. - Eça de Queirós in decadent Paris

Eça de Queirós often – always? – ends his novels with a coda, the ending after the ending.  In The City and the Mountains, someone needs to return to Paris.  The hero and fool of at the center of the novel has settled in the country, learned his lessons about living a useful life, and is now fixed in place, so Eça sends a different character, his narrator.  Come to think of it, given that the novel has a first-person narrator, who else could go?  The resulting chapter is a strange one.

The narrator discovers that Paris has gotten worse, that its pleasures have become bitter, that the city is not just decadent but corrupt.  In a foodie novel like this one, the food has to  be similarly ruined:

[A] fearful battle ensued between me and the flounder.  The wretch, which had clearly taken against me, would not allow me to detach from its spine so much as a tiny fragment of flesh,  It was as dry, burned, and impenetrable as shoe-leather, and my knife bent on it, impotent and tremulous.  I summoned the pallid waiter, who, equipped with a sturdier knife, and pressing down hard on the floor with the heels of his buckled shoes, finally managed to wrench from the stubborn creature two strips of flesh, as small and thin as toothpicks…  This cost me fifteen francs.  (264-5)

Later, the sauces all taste of hair oil.  Technically, I am bored by the conventional comparison with shoe leather, but am thrilled by the waiter and his shoes.  I imagine Buster Keaton in the role.  I included the last line, about the cost of the meal, to make sure that we all recognize the Paris of a century ago in the Paris of today, even if we have never had quite such bad luck with the food.  We have not, have we?  If you ate at Quick Burger or Flunch, that’s no one’s fault but your own.

The primary signs of the corruption of Paris are the usual, sex and money.  Virtually the first thing the narrator sees is “an enormous poster on which a naked woman, with bacchantic flowers in her hair, was disporting herself, holding in one hand a foaming bottle and brandishing in the other, as if to display it to the whole world, a brand-new type of corkscrew” (261).  The overwhelming irony is that the narrator quite openly visits the city for sexual adventures.  This time, though, the women, the buildings, the theater (“great streams of obscenities”), everything is spoiled.  The new-fangled bicycle craze makes the city uglier (“Old men with scarlet necks pedalled plumply by”).  Students openly jeer their professors just for kicks (this is a particularly odd episode).

Eça, and the narrator, lay it on awfully thick, much too thick for me to take the chapter too seriously as meaning much about Paris itself, or the city, or civilization, but instead as a comic twist:  the hero of the novel, in moving from urban decadence to rural idyll, has destroyed his friend’s pleasure in Paris.  The hero’s happiness has corrupted the narrator, spoiling him for sophistication.

Alternatively, the narrator is just a mouthpiece for Eça, the narrator’s rants are the author’s, and the last chapter of The City and the Mountains reveals a narrowing of Eça’s imaginative spirit near the end of his life.  I generously give the author credit for the former interpretation, but cannot dismiss the latter.

Then come and admire the sheer beauty of simplicity, you barbarian! - Eça de Queirós in the countryside

I am looking back at the St. Orberose overview of the novels of Eça de Queirós, where he describes The City and the Mountains as “a simplistic demonization of urban life and glorification of the countryside.”  The second half of his phrase is true.  Wealthy and jaded Jacinto, surrounded by gadgets and luxury, is unable to find anything meaningful in his life in Paris, but in the Portuguese mountains gradually discovers how to live a useful, fulfilled life.

Whether Jacinto’s restlessness has anything to do with Paris or his salvation with the Portuguese countryside is the question, though.   I am not convinced.  He is a spiritual seeker, who succumbs to every passing intellectual fashion:  Nietzscheism, Ruskinism, Ibsenism (“a real plague!”):

“Then Tolstoyism took over, and neo-cenobitic renunciation was all the rage.  I can still remember a dinner were a great monster of a Slav appeared, hair all dirty and disheveled, and when he wasn’t casting lewd glances at the poor Countess d’Arche’s décolletage, he was wagging his finger and growling: ‘We seek the light deep down, in the very dust of the earth!’”  (100)

Jacinto finally succumbs to Schopenhauer and Pessimism, allowing him to blame Life for his ills, rather than himself, and obsessively reading Ecclesiastes while unknowingly reinforcing its message.  Perhaps all is not vanity, but this is:

At other times, I would find him early in the morning lying on the sofa in a silk dressing gown and imbibing Schopenhauer, while the pedicurist knelt before him on the carpet, respectfully and expertly buffing his toenails.  Beside him lay a Saxe porcelain tea cup, full of that Mocha coffee sent by the emirs of the desert and which he never found strong enough or sufficiently aromatic.  (113)

So the move to the mountains in the center of the novel is just a device to separate Jacinto from all of his shiny stuff and his thirty thousand volume library and allow him to embrace a new enthusiasm, authentic country living.  It is Jacinto who glorifies the countryside more than the novel’s author, who takes it up as a new ideology (see p. 173, the home of my title).  He overflows with schemes of improvement, like a pointlessly elaborate English dairy.  He wants to plant trees, but:

“An oak tree takes thirty years before it reaches its full beauty!  It’s so discouraging!  It’s fine for God, who can afford to wait”…

He folded his hands on his knees and muttered again:

“Everything takes such a long time.”  (192-3)

Jacinto has another eighty pages in which to learn that he, too, can afford to wait.  Perhaps it is not so surprising that, in the end, a woman is involved, one who emerges from the most fairy tale-like chapter in this fairy take-like novel.  As wisdom goes, it is all pretty commonsensical.

I see that I have not gotten to the first part of Miguel’s description.  I would like to modify it – “an ambiguous demonization of urban life.”  “Demonization” is exactly right, and I know just which part of the book he means, a sour pickle of a chapter.  I believe I will save it for tomorrow, which means To the Capital gets bumped to next week.  Even these minor Eça novels are plump and rich.

This is true Civilization! - Eça de Queirós on information technology and molecular gastronomy

The City and the Mountains (1901) and To the Capital (1925) are a pair of posthumous Eça de Queirós novels that I was fortunate enough to read one after the other.  They set each other off nicely.  The titles tell part of the story:  To the Capital moves from the dismal countryside to the lively city; The City and the Mountains retreats from the decadent city to the healthful countryside.  That both books are by the same writer, written around the same time, might suggest that neither view of the city or mountains is meant to be definitive.

I could go on and on with a compare-and-contrast.  Wouldn’t that be fun?  Roughly, shortly: To the Capital is written in the thick, rich style of The Maias and Cousin Basilio, of Flaubert and Zola.  The City and the Mountains is lighter and sparser, more of a literary cartoon.  It reminds me of an entirely different sort of French artist:  René Clair or Jacques Tati.

The countrified narrator is visiting his friend Jacinto who, for the purposes of comedy, is the richest man in Paris.  Jacinto is a devotee of Progress, and a recognizable figure:

From the foot of [Jacinto’s] desk, soft, fat cable snaked over the carpet, scurrying into the shadows like startled cobras.  On a bench, and reflected in its varnished surface as if in the water of a well, stood a Writing Machine, and further off a vast Adding Machine, with rows of holes from which protruded stiff, metal numbers, patiently waiting.  (21)

Those cables lead not just to Jacinto’s telephone and telegraph, but to his Theaterphone (with enough headsets for twenty-four listeners) and a Conferencephone which connects directly to university lectures (“It’s frightfully convenient”).  The conveniences continue in the kitchen, as with “another prodigious tool, all silver and glass, for frenetically tossing salads, but the first time I tried it, all the vinegar spurted out, temporarily blinding my Prince, who retreated howling” (75).  Jacinto is also a devotee of molecular gastronomy:

All I could make of the next dish was that it contained chicken and truffles.  Afterwards, his gentlemen guests would be savoring a venison fillet marinated in sherry and served with walnut jelly.  And for dessert, iced oranges in ether.

“Why in ether, Jacinto?”

My friend hesitated and made a rippling gesture with his fingers as of an aroma being wafted away.

“It’s a new thing.  Apparently the ether develops and brings out the soul of the fruit.”

I bowed my head and murmured to myself:

“This is true Civilization!”  (28-9)

It is easy enough to guess that once the characters make it to the Portuguese mountains the food will be of an entirely different character, unpretentious, authentic, healthful, and so on.  My own experience with Portuguese food suggests that Eça is cheating, that to make a point about the ideological superiority of country cooking one should not stack the deck so badly, but serve his characters the downhome food of rural England, or rural Minnesota, something less obviously delicious than Portuguese country cooking.  Might as well tell me that the food is good in Sicily or Normandy.  That proves nothing!  But perhaps Eça had some other point.

Miguel launched his outstanding St. Orberose book blog with a survey of Eça’s novels.  He calls The City and the Mountains his “least favourite” for reasons that are clear enough.  I will try to defend the book a bit tomorrow.  Cartoons can be valuable works of art.  I would not claim that The City and the Mountains is as culturally significant as “What’s Opera, Doc,” but still.

Margaret Jull Costa translated The City and the Mountains.

Eça de Queiros and his doubles - cluck-cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck-cluck!

Here’s another example:

Eça de Queiros and some of his prankster pals published, in 1869, a set of poems under the name of Fradique Mendes, Portuguese knockoffs of Baudelaire and other French avant-gardists.  Decades later, Eça resurrected the poet, making him the ideal post-Romantic type of the Great Man, brilliant and elegant, like the protagonist of The Maias but with more energy and talent.  The eventual result was a short novel-like object, The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes (1888/1901), which pretends to be a collection of the letters of this exemplar, preceded by the author’s, Eça’s, own encounters with and biography of him.

The first joke is that “Eça” discovers Fradique Mendes through his only published works, those poems, “a revelation in art, a dawn of poetry coming into birth to bathe young souls in the light and special warmth to which they aspired” (5).  The second joke is thus Eça turning himself into the absurd devotee of poems he wrote as a gag.

The letters themselves are full of anecdotes, sketches, jokes with punchlines, witty asides, overheated rhetoric, and nothing resembling a story.  Some of the letters are addressed to real people.  Eça de Queiros can express outrageous views while hidden behind Fradique Mendes:

A man should only speak with impeccable assurance and purity the language of his own country; all the others he should speak poorly, poorly but proudly, with the flat and false accent that immediately marks him as a foreigner…  His patriotism disappears, diluted by foreignness. (73-4)

But of course, the witty and ironic Fradique may not mean a word he writes; the letter ends with conclusive evidence of his “admirable aunt who spoke only Portuguese (or rather, the Minho dialect).”  Wherever she traveled:

[she] would call over the waiter, fix her sharp and meaningful eyes on him, and squat gravely on the carper and imitate, with a slow puffing up of her ample skirts, a hen in the act of laying as she shouted cluck-cluck-cluck, cluck-cluck-cluck! (75)

And she always got her eggs.

The example I want to keep is that of the novelist coming up with a fictional mouthpiece, a common enough practice, but then pairing him up with a parodic version of himself, perhaps still common, but then making both character and narrator so inscrutably ironic that the author is not only free to express his most deeply-held views, but also their opposite, and, why not, some other ideas that no one believes, but are amusing.

Gregory Rabassa gave this novel its English debut.  I wrote at some point that I was not so concerned with where to start with a writer like Eça, but I would like to amend that opinion: do not start with Correspondence of Fradique Mendes.  The jokes are of the inside variety – I guess an outside joke is merely a joke.  The way to join the jokes on the inside of this novel is to read a lot of 19th century French poetry and a stack of Eça de Queiros novels, two good ideas.

The beautiful land of Portugal, so full of endearing charm - the party and the coda in Eça de Queiros

Two tools that Eça de Queiros loved.

Party scenes.  Not big ones, balls or weddings, but more intimate gatherings, friends gathering over dinner, drinking themselves senseless, arguing about profound nonsense.  Sometimes the party is a regular event, not really a party at all but just a routine social activity.  A little piano playing, some snacks, some cards.  The Crime of Father Amaro and Cousin Basilio both structure the entire book around this kind of scene.  Sometimes the party is a rarer bird, a chance to indulge.  The Maias has some superb scenes of this type.  Chapter 2 of The Illustrious House of Ramires has a good one, too.

The great advantage to the author is that the party almost forces the reader to plunge in to the world of the novel, just like in a real party where I only know the person I came with.  I am introduced to a bewildering array of names and descriptions, lucky if I tack a characteristic or two onto each name.  In Chapter 2 of Ramires, Gonçalo meets his friends for dinner.  Here comes Titó (“powerful limbs…  slow rumble of his powerful voice…  idleness”) , maybe a bit of a weary libertine, and Gouveia (“very dark and very dry…  a bowler-hat tilted over one ear”) who has an aversion to cucumbers.

Wait, do I need to remember that?  Right now, there is no way to know.  The dinner scenes are humorously exhausting.  Luckily, the food is good:

Gonçalo , who claimed he had been miraculously cured [of a kidney pain] after the walk to Bravais and the excitement of the card-game, at which he had won nineteen tostões from Manuel Duarte – began with a dish of eggs and smoked sausage, devoured half the mullet, consumed his ‘invalid’s chicken’, cleared the dish of cucumber salad and finished off with a pile of quince jelly cubes; and as he accomplished this noble work, he emptied (without any flushing of that pure white skin) a glazed mug of Alvaralhão wine, because after the first sip of the Abbot’s new wine, he had cursed it, to Titó’s annoyance.  (29)

What juicy, thick writing.  It’s just a way to show the characters in action, any kind of action.

Then there is the coda.  Every remotely longish Eça novel ends with a coda chapter, letting us look back (“Four years passed lightly and swiftly like a flight of birds over the ancient Tower” – that was swift!), often with a lot of irony, although I do not remember there ever being anything like a plot twist.  The plot is finished.

The last chapter of Ramires does have a formal twist.  We have spent the entire novel with Gonçalo, sometimes watching him, sometimes deep in his thoughts, but the limit of the limited third has been strict.  The coda is entirely about Gonçalo, but he never appears in it, although he is described in a letter.  Many of the characters are reunited – they are preparing for a party that we do not get to attend.

The gentle last line of the novel, in the voice of whom?:

Father Soeiro, his sunshade under his arm, made his way slowly back to the Tower, in the silence and softness of the evening, reciting his Hail Maries and praying for the peace of God for Gonçalo, for all men, for the fields and the sleeping farms, and for the beautiful land of Portugal, so full of endearing charm, that it might be for ever blessed among lands. (310)

Thanks, Scott, for the readalonging.

Where to start with Eça de Queirós, a non-answer

Where should a reader start with Eça de Queirós?  Or Charles Dickens, or Virginia Woolf, or William Shakespeare?  These are not my questions.  I assume the existence of a reader with a large appetite, and enough sense to not dismiss the judgments of previous good readers on the basis of a random encounter with Barnaby Rudge or Henry VIII.

As I get to know an author, the question I ask is: where should I stop?  Which books are just trivia, or impenetrable period pieces, or juvenilia, or scrapbooks? For a certain kind of critic – Edmund Wilson, Frank Kermode – who reviews new novels only after reading something close to everything the author had ever written, there is no stopping place.  How this was feasible, I do not know, except that I suppose these critics read a lot faster than I do, or magazine deadlines were more leisurely than I imagine.

Given enough time, almost anyone can read almost everything.  Major works are read in pursuit of the experience of great art, minor works in the pursuit of knowledge.  Knowledge about the major works, most likely.   I am getting close to “everything” – well past the halfway point – with Eça de Queirós.  Wilson and Kermode, unlike me, were not blockheaded enough to publish their notes, or to work for free.

But that’s not my point, which is, rather, that The Illustrious House of Ramires, although well-written, humorous, representative of Eça’s lifelong concerns, and on in this vein, may not be a great place to start, although Scott Bailey did darn well.  Ramires is the most deeply Portuguese of the Eça novels that I have seen so far.  It makes more demanding assumptions about the history and culture of the country.  I suspect that the demands would be similar for Portuguese readers who are not medieval history buffs, but still, the names, dates, and places come thick and fast in the first few pages:

One of the most valiant of the line, Lourenço, nicknamed the Butcher, foster-brother of Afonso Henriques (with whom, the same night in Zamora Cathedral, he kept vigil over his arms before receiving his knighthood) appears at once in the Battle of Ourique where Jesus Christ also appeared, on fine clouds of gold, nailed to a cross ten ells high. (6)

One of those names I admit I already knew.  Our hero Gonçalo, a coward, in fact a Portuguese nebbish, lives under the shadow of “a House ten centuries old, with more than thirty of its males killed in battle” (288).  Over the course of the novel, we see Gonçalo make peace with his past and overcome his nebbishness – Ramires is, in form, a classic Nebbishroman – partly through the means of the historical novel about his own ancestors, The Tower of Don Ramires, that he is writing or more accurately rewriting, stealing the whole thing from a poem written by his uncle:

The whole plot, with its passion of barbaric grandeur, the savage battles in which family feuds were settled by the dagger, heroic words uttered by steely lips – there it all was in dear Uncle’s verses, sonorous and nicely balanced:

[poem snipped]

Really, all that was needed was to superimpose the mellifluous tones of 1846 Romanticism upon its terse, virile prose…  Would this be plagiarism?  No!  To whom, more than to him, a Ramires, belonged the memory of these historic Ramires?  (16)

A summary of the historical novel is, as it is composed, part of Ramires – more names, more history, and at first with only the broadest thematic connection to the contemporary story.  It all works out in the end, though, in the third act, as Scott calls it – “you realize that you've been marvelously set up.”   Gonçalo grows out of his plagiarism.

So, a place to start, why not, right, Scott? Bad place to stop, though.

What else should I write about? That Nebbishroman thing was just a joke.

Yes, really, all of them were so little guilty before God - the surprisingly sweet Illustrious House of Ramires

I was reading an early novel of Eça de Queirós, The Crime of Father Amaro, alongside a much later one, The Illustrious House of Ramires (1900, published just after the author’s death).  Eça may well have mellowed with age.  Father Amaro is cruel; Ramires is almost sweet.

Young and aimless nobleman Gonçalo Ramires holds the oldest title in Portugal and lives in the shadow of a thousand year-old tower and a string of illustrious ancestors.  He dreams of imitating the medieval exploits of his heroic forebears, but times have changed a bit – leading one’s feudal retainers to ravage one’s neighboring enemies is frowned upon – and anyways Gonçalo is a coward.  He is also a terrible braggart, which is a kind way of calling him a congenital liar; he is also extraordinarily kind to children, the ill, and other weak people.  Weak people like himself.

After the chilly elegance of The Maias, the savageness of Father Amaro, and the hysterics of Cousin Basilio, I am almost shocked at how gentle Ramires is, how nice Gonçalo is.  Not that he’s not a fool – the last line in this passage (ellipses in original) could stand as a description of any number of  Eça’s characters:

He, Gonçalo, had stupidly and irresistibly succumbed to the fatal Law of Increase, which had led him, as it leads everyone in their desire for fame and fortune, to pass rashly through the first door that opened to him, without noticing the dung that cluttered up the doorway…  Yes, really, all of them were so little guilty before God, who had created man so variable, so weak, so dependent on forces that were less governable than the wind or sun! (218)

This is being thought by Gonçalo himself.  One of his most endearing, and frustrating, traits is his changeability.  He can be venal, but never for too long.  He can be skeptically thoughtful, but is too easily comforted.  He is ambitious, artistically and politically, but is too easily distracted.  An inevitable result is self-pity.  Another motto (ellipses again not mine):

“Why?” murmured Gonçalo, miserably removing his coat.  “So much deception in such a short life…  Why?  Poor me!”

He fell upon his vast bed as if into a tomb, and hid his face in the pillow with a sigh, a sigh full of pity for so frustrated and helpless a fate.  (235)

Gonçalo is an early edition of a popular Modernist character, the kind who through charm and good intentions quickly engages my sympathy, but then spends the rest of the novel making me wince.  Oh, Gonçalo, pull yourself together!

I want to spend a couple more days with the book.  Perhaps I will engage with the ideas of Scott Bailey, who write about the novel here and also here.

The Illustrious House of Ramires is translated by Anne Stevens.  The translation is so good that the novel has not been re-translated by Margaret Jull Costa!

The grass, the graves and the cold mists; the essence of city life - the sublime endings of The Crime of Father Amaro

The ending, or endings, of The Crime of Father Amaro.

Near the middle of the novel, a minor character dies; Amaro is her attending priest.  Eça de Queirós uses the episode to give us a look at the genuine spiritual power of even a bad priest like Amaro.  His delivery of the last rites is a serious and meaningful responsibility, meaningful to the dying and those around her, even if Amaro himself sees the duty only as a burden, and even though he uses the incident to chase women.

The early scene foreshadows two later deaths, one where Amaro fails in his ordinary priestly duties, and another where his failure is considerably worse than ordinary.  Whatever Eça may mock, he takes death seriously enough.

This last death leads to a funeral scene, too, although a curious one, since the author mostly does not show us the funeral – he is using the limited third person for all it is worth.  We follow the funeral procession to a chapel but do not enter it; we instead join a pair of servants who take the opportunity to “wander” into a tavern and gossip.  The chapel door is a threshold Eça does not want to cross, the genuine religious service something he does not want us to see.  It exists outside of this novel.  The servants rejoin the procession for the burial, so we do get to see that.  The scene ends with the point of view leaving the servants, the camera “pulling back”:

‘Amen,’ came the deep voice of the sacristan and the shrill voice of the choirboy.

‘Amen,’ said the others in a sighing murmur that was lost amongst the cypresses, the grass, the graves and the cold mists of that sad December day. (461)

This is not Father Amaro’s ending.  We need a few pages more for him.  A “man of state and two men of religion,” Amaro one of them, accidentally meet at the foot of the statue of Camões (see wiki for photo - when visiting Lisbon, you can recreate the scene!), author of The Lusiads, hero of Portuguese culture, representative of empire and glory.  An ironic contrast might be on its way.

‘Well, just look around you!  What peace, what vigour, what prosperity!’

And he made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole of the Largo do Loreto, which, at that hour, at the close of a serene afternoon, contained the essence of city life.  Empty carriages rode slowly by; women in twos tottered past, wearing false hair and high heels and displaying the anaemic pallor of a degenerate race… (470)

More: a hungover nobleman, people sprawling in “idle torpor,” pimps, an ox cart (“the symbol of an antiquated agricultural system dating back centuries”), lottery-peddling urchins.  The laying on, it is thick.  The geography of the square, and the nature of Portugal, is finally summarized as “two gloomy church façades… three pawnshop signs… four taverns.”  It’s a sublimely savage passage, worthy of one of Victor Hugo’s great explosions.  In the last words of the novel, our bad priest and his worse superiors congratulate themselves, under the gaze of their great poet, for the marvelous achievements of their civilization, the very thing that the reader of the novel has spent the previous 470 pages watching them destroy.

It proves their true devotion to the priesthood - the mechanics of power in Father Amaro

Many readers, although people of boundless curiosity, non-insular and anti-parochial, true citizens of the world, might be unsure if The Crime of Father Amaro, a novel about  the misdeeds of mid-19th century Portuguese priests, has any continuing interest.  The Catholic priesthood is now, just to pick one of the book’s sticky points, entirely voluntary and vocational.  Fair point.

The abuse of power by the novel’s priests is just a specific example of a universal theme, though, and Eça de Queirós is a true artist, meaning that the only path to the large is through the small.  An abuse of power can be reformed, but we need a novelist like Eça to see how it works.

I'm in the middle of the novel.  Father Amaro and Amélia are in love but restraining themselves, and Amélia’s now-former fiancé is behaving, completely understandably, like a jackass, culminating in a pathetically ineffectual physical attack on the priest.  A group of priests and devout ladies gather every evening at the house of Amélia’s mother, so here they are together after the attack.  Father Amaro has turned the other cheek, and why not, since he is the victor:

Such saintliness drove the women wild.  What an angel!  They gazed on him adoringly, their hands almost raised in prayer.  His presence, like that of a St Vincent de Paul, exuding charity, gave the room a chapel-like sweetness… (264)

So far, so satirical.  Just a little vicious towards these women, fools, admittedly.  But they are not Eça’s true targets.  The most combative of the priests declares the fiancé has been automatically excommunicated and that having in the house any of the excommunicant’s possessions is a threat to the soul, for example, this magazine, and that cigarette case, and this stray glove:

‘We must destroy them!’ exclaimed Dona Maria da Assunção.  ‘We must burn them, burn them!’

The room echoed now with the shrill cries of the women, in the grip of a holy fury. (268)

Eça and I are still mocking the superstitious biddies, it seems, but here is the punchline:

The clamouring women raced into the kitchen.  Even São Joaneira followed them, as a good hostess, to watch over the bonfire.

Left alone, the three priests looked at each other and laughed.

‘Women are the very devil,’ said the Canon philosophically.

‘No, Father,’ said Natário, growing suddenly serious.  ‘I’m laughing because although, seen from outside, it may look ridiculous, the sentiment behind it is good.  It proves their true devotion to the priesthood, their horror of impiety.  And that, after all, is an admirable sentiment.’

‘Oh, admirable,’ agreed Amaro, equally seriously. (269)

All of this nonsense is just an arbitrary demonstration of power, a prank.  Eça, in scenes like this, shows how the older priests corrupt the younger, not by openly advocating for vice, but for their own power and privilege.  Poor Amélia’s not going to have a chance against Amaro.

Tomorrow I think I will move to the end, to the two ends, of the novel.

Ah, a priest could have enjoyed himself then - beginning The Crime of Father Amaro

Three readers have joined me to read The Crime of Father Amaro, the first (1875) or second (1876) or fourth (1880) novel of Eça de Queirós.  I finished the book last, after Richard (Caravana de Recuerdos), litlove (Tales from the Reading Room), and ombhurbhuva.  I believe this was the first Eça de Queirós for everyone but me, and I understand that everyone thought it was a good place to start with this fine novelist.

A young, worldly priest, Father Amaro, obtains a position in a provincial cathedral town, where he finds that the priestly class is venal, sexually active, gluttonous and domineering, especially of the city’s more pious and superstitious women.  Amaro , who never wanted to be a priest and who has a purely instrumental ethical sense, soon seduces the beautiful and all-too-susceptible Amélia, the daughter of his landlady.  Consequences ensue, mostly of the predictable variety.   See the links above for better summaries, please.

I was nervous that the novel, which is brutally anti-clerical, would be a topical period piece, but the version we all read, at least, is like Eça’s other novels: humanist Zola, or Flaubert with a heart.  Litlove called the novel “a study in how to keep a book engaging despite having a cast of unsympathetic characters”; Eça’s secret is that he allows us to understand everyone, no matter how stupidly they behave (and they can be awfully stupid), and cold understanding can sometimes melt into warm sympathy.  Another way to say the same thing: Eça de Queirós is, more than anything else, brilliant with characters.

For example, Amaro, our hero, a less intelligent Julien Sorel, the center of The Red and the Black, begins the novel with my sympathy but squanders it as he becomes increasingly corrupted.  His inner life, after a romantic setback:

And then the old despair returned that he was not living in the times of the Inquisition and could not therefore pack them off to prison on some accusation of irreligion or black magic.  Ah, a priest could have enjoyed himself then.  But now, with the liberals in power, he was forced to watch as that wretched clerk earning six vinténs a day made off with the girl, whilst he, an educated priest, who might become a bishop or even Pope, had to bow his shoulders and ponder his grief alone.  If God’s curses had any value, then let them be cursed. (176-7)

And an external view, after romantic success:

For [Amélia], at least, [Amaro] was handsome and better than any count or duke, and as worthy of a mitre as the wisest of men.  She herself had once said to him, after thinking for a moment:

‘You could become Pope!’

‘I am certainly the stuff Popes are made of,’ he replied gravely. (313)

Amaro’s vanity, humorlessness, and, worst of all, his sense of power is clear enough.  A potential monster.  One of the tragedies of this comic novel is that his potential is realized.

What else should I write about?  The ending, the last page, certainly.  Eça’s party scenes?  Dona Maria da Assunçao’s museum of arsenal of saints?  So many possibilities.

Margaret Jull Costa was, unsurprisingly, the translator of the New Directions edition I read.