Brazilian short stories

Monteiro Lobato represents the most recent phase of the Brazilian reaction against Gallic literary influence. Though not pretending primarily to be a writer, he yet has inaugurated what amounts not “to” almost to a new period of the national letters. At the bottom of his nationalism, however, is the one valid foundation of art: sincerity. If occasionally he overdoes his protest against the French, he may well be forgiven because of its sound basis; it is part of his own personality to see things in the primary colors, to play the national zealot not in any chauvinistic sense; he is no blind follower of the administrative powers, no nationalist in the ugly sense of cheap partisan drum-beating, but in the sense that true nationalism is the logical development of the fatherland’s potentialities. A personally independent fellow, then, who would achieve for his nation that same independence.

The beginning of the World War found Monteiro Lobato established upon a fazenda, far from the thoughts and centers of literature. It was by accident that he discovered his gifts as a writer. The story is told that one day, rendered indignant by the custom of clearing stubble fields by fire, and thus endangering the bordering inhabitants, he sent a letter of protest to a large daily in São Paulo. It seems that the letter was too important, too well-written, too plainly indicative of natural literary talent, to be relegated to the corner where readers’ jeremiads usually wail, and that, instead, it was “featured” upon the first page. From that day the die was cast. The episode, in my opinion, is far more important than it appears. For, whatever form in which the man’s later writings are published, they are in a more important degree just what this initial venture was: a protest, a means of civic betterment, a national contribution.

It was with the collection named “Urupês” (Fungi) that Lobato definitely established himself. Upon the success of that book he has built a powerful publishing house, a splendid magazine (“Revista do Brasil”--The Brazilian Review), a veritable literary movement. He excels in stinging comment upon current affairs; he writes books for the primary schools; he is a practical nature bent upon visibly altering the national course. As a writer, he is “anti-literary,” scorning the finer graces. Together with a similar group in Buenos Aires he underestimates the aesthetic element in art, confusing it, perhaps, with the snobbish, aloof, vapory spirits who have a habit of infesting all movements with their neurotic lucubrations. Yet such a view may do him, as it does Manuel Gálvez in Argentina, or Upton Sinclair in the United States, injustice. His style, his attitude, his product, are directly conditioned by the ambient in which he works and the problems he has set out to solve. Less unjust, surely is the criticism that may be made against him when--as is characteristic of such natures--his earnestness degenerates into special pleading, when his intense feeling tapers off into sentimentality, and when what was meant to be humor falls away to caricature.

Lobato’s work in every phase is first of all an act of nationalism. To this caustic spirit, the real Brazil--the Brazil that must set to work stamping its impress upon the arts of the near future--lies in the interior of the country, away from the cosmopolitanism of the littoral. Yet his practise largely belies this implied regionalism.

That he is gifted with the rare faculty of self-criticism may be seen from a letter I received from him some time after I had introduced him to North American readers in a newspaper article.

“I was born,” he wrote, “on the 18th of April, 1883, in Tabauté, State of São Paulo, the son of parents who owned a coffee plantation. I began my studies in the city, proceeding later to São Paulo, where I matriculated as a law student, being graduated, like everybody else, as a Bachelor of Laws. Fond of literature, I read a great deal in my youth: my favorite authors were Kipling, Maupassant, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, Balzac, Wells, Dickens, Camillo Castello Branco, Eça de Queiroz and Machado de Assis ... but I never allowed myself to be dominated by any one.” (Let me interrupt the letter long enough to quote Lobato on literary influences. In his stimulating collection of critiques entitled “Idéas de Jéca Tatu” he has said: “Let us agree that imitation is, in fact, the greatest of creative forces. He imitates who assimilates processes. Who copies, does not imitate; he steals. Who plagiarizes does not imitate; he apes.” And let us recall that Lobato presents this book as “a war-cry in favor of personality).” To continue with the letter:

“I like to see with my own eyes, smell with my own nose. All my work reveals this personal impression, almost always cruel, for, in my opinion, we are the remnant of a race approaching annihilation. Brazil will be something in the future, but the man of today, the Luso-Africano-Indian will pass out of existence, absorbed and assimilated by other, stronger races ... just as the primitive aborigine passed. Even as the Portuguese caused the disappearance of the Indian, so will the new races cause the disappearance of the hybrid Portuguese, whose rôle in Brazilian civilization is already fulfilled, having consisted in the vast labor of clearing the land by the destruction of the forests. The language will remain, gradually more and modified by the influence of the new milieu, so different from the Lusitanian milieu.

“Brazil is an ailing country.”

Let me interrupt once again, to say that in his pamphlet “Problema Vital,” Lobato studies this problem, indicating that man will be victorious over the tropical zone through the new arms of hygiene. The pamphlet caused a turmoil throughout Brazil, and sides were at once formed, the one considering Lobato a defamer of the nation, the other seeing in the work an act of sanative patriotism. As a result, a national program of sanitation was inaugurated. This realism of approach, so characteristic of Lobato, made of his figure Jéca Tatu a symbol that has in many minds replaced the idealized image of Pery, from Alencar’s “Guarany.” Jéca thus stands for the most recent critical reaction against national romanticism.

“I recognize now,” continues Lobato in the letter, “that I was cruel, but it was the only way of stirring opinion in that huge whale of most rudimentary nervous system which is my poor Brazil. I am not properly a literary man. I take no pleasure in writing, nor do I attach the slightest importance to what is called literary glory and similar follies. I am a particle of extremely sensitive conscience that adopted the literary form,--fiction, the conte, satire,--as the only means of being heard and heeded. I achieved my aim and today I devote myself to the publishing business, where I find a solid means of sustaining the great idea that, in order to cure an ailing person he must first be convinced that he is, in fact, a sick man.”

Here, as elsewhere, Lobato’s theory is harsher than his practise. He is, of course, a literary man, and has achieved a distinctive style; but he knows, as his letter hints, that his social strength may prove his literary weakness. The truth would seem to be that Monteiro Lobato is not so much a teller of stories as he is a critic of men. The three tales by which he is represented in this booklet come from his “Urupês”; they exhibit him at his favorite pursuit of caricaturing his fellow men, of deriding their political foibles, their personal weakness, their social shortcomings. “Modern Torture” would not have shamed Mark Twain. It is not so intimately Brazilian that it cannot apply, with little alteration, to wardheelers in the United States. “The Penitent Wag” is an experiment in the macabre that also serves as a piece of social criticism. “The Plantation Buyer” is just as comical in the United States of America as in the United States of Brazil.

As I write, Lobato’s São Paulo is seething with revolt. Revolution, in ideas and in action have been the history of that region. It is not the least of Lobato’s virtues that his intellectual revolt seeks practical outlet. He means his blue-prints to be, some day, inspiring temples. And he is one of the finest social architects of contemporary Brazil.[1]