All Is Beauty Now
Page 31
Above all, I’m grateful to my husband, Oisín Curran, for his boundless encouragement and for reading almost as many drafts of this book as I have. And to our children, Fianan and Neva, for so much joy.
NOTES AND SOURCES
I am indebted to the work of several great writers and artists that enabled me to write a book set in a country I’ve never visited and during a time before I was born. I cannot name them all here but a special thank-you is owed to the following works.
The prose, poetry, and letters of Elizabeth Bishop written during the years she lived in Brazil were invaluable. In particular, my descriptions of Petrópolis were informed by Bishop’s letters, collected in One Art (edited by Robert Giroux), and her poetry collection Questions of Travel. For a deeper understanding of the people, development, and landscape of the Copacabana neighbourhood, I owe much to Beatriz Jaguaribe’s fascinating Rio de Janeiro: Urban Life Through the Eyes of the City. Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil is an absorbing book that helped me better understand the complicated, often violent colonial history of a beautiful, complex country. His descriptions of Bahia and Recife informed some of Dora’s descriptions of travelling to and walking through Salvador. Several passages in the book were also inspired by Chroniques Brésiliennes, a beautiful collection of José Medeiros’s photography of the Brazilian people in the 1940s and ’50s.
For research into the post–Civil War migration of the Confederados from the American South to Brazil, I relied on The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil (edited by Cyrus B. and James M. Dawsey), Eugene C. Harter’s The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, and Ricardo Orizio’s Lost White Tribes: The End of Privilege and the Last Colonials in Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Brazil, Haiti, Namibia, and Guadeloupe. Some of the Maurer family stories were inspired by first-person accounts related in these books. The fictional community of Villa Confederação is based on the real municipality of Villa Americana, located outside São Paulo.
Two memoirs by Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind and Nothing Was the Same, were crucial to my research on bipolar disorder. Both are penetrating and empathetic studies that were particularly helpful to me in developing the character of Hugo. Several of Mills Baker’s posts on Quora.com were also very valuable in deepening my understanding of bipolarity. David Healy’s Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder provided me with historical context for the treatments available in the 1950s and ’60s. Other useful books include Maria Carolina de Jesus’s Children of the Dark, Michael Greenburg’s Hurry Down Sunshine, Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk, and Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, which inspired Hugo’s speech about hot air balloons, democracy, and the French Revolution.
In a few places in the novel, which is set in 1963, I have deviated from the historical timeline for artistic reasons. For example, Richard Strauss’s Gertrude’s Child wasn’t published until 1966, and Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Together wasn’t published until 1971. Also, while gambling was outlawed in Rio in the 1940s, many Cariocas (or at least my grandmother) continued to refer to the fashionable nightclubs as “the casinos” in later decades.
A very smart person once said, ‘In art, the details do not need to be accurate. They just need to be convincing.’ I have tried to use the research outlined above to make this novel as convincing as possible, but it no doubt contains errors, inaccuracies, and omissions. In some cases, I have knowingly taken liberties with the truth, and in other cases, when facts could not be found, I have simply made things up. In the end, this was an act of imagination, and a love letter to the Brazil conjured by my family’s stories.
1 Star of the sea, pray for the wanderer. Pray for me… Lyrics from the Marian hymn “Hail, Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star,” by Father John Lingard (1771–1851).
2 The story Luiza tells Evie is adapted from “The Girl Without Hands” by the Brothers Grimm.
3 filled to the gills with those sequined showgirls, all happy little things, pretty and so young. Everything was yayaya The description of the Cassino da Copacabana is adapted from the September 2011 Vanity Fair article “All Havana Broke Loose: An Oral History of Tropicana,” by Jean Stein.
4 ‘Be woe to you, Copacabana …’ Adapted from the poem “Ai de Ti, Copacabana,” by Rubem Braga, as translated and quoted by Beatriz Jaguaribe in Rio de Janeiro: Urban Life Through the Eyes of the City (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 155.
5 ‘This is how we have our first accounts of what industrial Victorian cities looked like …’ Hugo’s monologue about hot-air balloons, the French Revolution, and Pilâtre de Rozier are adapted from several paragraphs in Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 123–7.
6 ‘The South Zone was ours’ Adapted from Paulo Francis’s memoir The Affection That Ends, as translated and quoted by Beatriz Jaguaribe in Rio de Janeiro: Urban Life Through the Eyes of the City (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 165.
7 ‘That hair, like the sun, I had that hair but mine was yellow also like the sun but the yellow sun not the red sun …’ Adapted with permission from a post on Quora.com by Mills Baker (https://www.quora.com/What-does-a -manic-episode-feel-like/answer/Mills-Baker).
8 ‘If you become a fish in a trout stream, I will become a fisherman and fish for you.’ From Margaret Wise Brown, The Runaway Bunny (New York: Harper & Row, 1942), 3.
9 lightning jumped from peak to peak around the harbour. Adapted from Elizabeth Bishop’s Prose, edited by Lloyd Schwartz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 187.
10 wax-white, dead-eye pearls.… Wet, stuck, purple. Adapted from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Electrical Storm,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 100.
11 Tall, uncertain palms.… Your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life.’ Adapted from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Arrival at Santos,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p.89.
12 Illegal fire balloons.… Paper chambers flush and fill with light.… Flare and falter, wobble and toss.… splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff. Adapted from Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Armadillo,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), p.103.
13 The Hindenburg appeared a conquering giant in the sky, but she proved a puny plaything in the mighty grip of fate… Adapted from the British Pathé newsreel “Tragedy of The Hindenburg” (1937).
14 His hair is not hair, but vibrissae.… His eyes are those of flies, faceted and jewel-toned Adapted from Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (New York: Vintage, 1995), 3.
15 I get midstsy … Hopeless as a kid lost at sea. Adapted from “Misty,” lyrics by Johnny Burke. (First appeared on the Johnny Mathis album Heavenly, released by Columbia Records in 1959.)
16 She quick-churned into a dancing stream Adapted from Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There (Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1981), 26.
17 But he could strip off his own skin and still not get down to the place where he went wrong Adapted from the film Michael Clayton. Directed by Tony Gilroy (Los Angeles: Warner Bros., 2007).
18 Somewhere, lately, a serpent’s egg has hatched Adapted from Zuenir Ventura’s Cidade Partida (The Divided City), as translated by Beatriz Jaguaribe in Rio de Janeiro: Urban Life Through the Eyes of the City (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 158.
19 a headless chicken in an alleyway tied up in red string, an empty bottle of wine beside it.… A single red candle, placed in a hand-dug pit. Adapted from an anecdote in Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art: Letters, selected and edited by Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 243.
20 And as darkness gathered over Europe, reformations and counter-reformations … Adapted from a passage in Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil: A Book of Omissions (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 65.
21 Like some rough gale, blowing me all about … while I blaze and swoon Adapted from Virginia Woolf, A Writ
er’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, 1982), 176, 180.
22 I found my love in Avalon, beside the bay … Adapted from “Avalon,” lyrics by Al Jolson, Buddy DeSylva, and Vincent Rose, 1920.
23 When you lie down, you will not be afraid … From Proverbs 3:24 (New International Version).
24 Mother benign of our redeeming Lord … Lyrics from “Loving Mother of Our Saviour” (originally composed in Latin as Alma Redemptoris Mater) by Hermann of Reichenau (1013–1054).
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