Sue’s marriage to Mr. Phillotson is the baldest inconsistency. She has a sort of unworldliness and caprice that allows her to undertake this union. The schoolmaster has none of the stirring pathos of Jude. He has early been overwhelmed by the hypocrisy and deadness of the small educational institutions of his time. He sees the lightness of Sue, her indifference to advantage, and he believes that he might appropriate some of her wayward magic to relieve his own heavy spirits. Sue, as it turns out, feels a profound aversion to Mr. Phillotson. She is aware of it—awareness of feeling is, as Irving Howe says in his brilliant portrait of Sue, part of her modernity, her fascination—aware not as an idea, but as an emotion completely personal and pressing. She hides in a dismal closet rather than enter the bedroom. Once, dreaming that he was approaching her, she jumped out of the window.
Is this neurasthenia and hysteria? To look at it in that way is to impose a late abstraction of definition upon a soul, one might almost say a new kind of human being, struggling to take form in history. The personal, the analytical, the passion for self-knowledge that raise authenticity above everything, and certainly above duty and submission, come so naturally to Sue that she is almost childlike. Hypocrisy, especially in matters of feeling, is to her a sacrilege. At one point, Jude asks her if she would like to join him in evening prayers and she says, “Oh, no, no! . . . I should feel such a hypocrite.”
After she has been married to Phillotson for eight weeks, Sue tries to voice her feelings. “Perhaps you have seen what it is I want to say—that though I like Mr. Phillotson as a friend, I don’t like him—it is a torture to me to live with him as a husband!” She goes on to say in despair that she has been told women can “shake down to it,” and yet “that is much like saying that the amputation of a limb is no affliction, since a person gets comfortably accustomed to the use of a wooden leg or arm in the course of time.” In addition to aversion, she laments “the sordid contract” of marriage and “the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a matter whose essence is its voluntariness.”
Authenticity, chastity, renunciation. Of course, Sue is not able to live out completely the deep stirrings of her nature. She feels a sympathy for Jude that is a transcendent friendship as profound and rare as love. It is sanctified by their sufferings and by the ever-spreading insecurity of their existence, by the unreality of themselves as a plan of life. In the absence of surroundings—they are like itinerants with no articles to offer as they wander in a circle from town to town—in the way their need has no more claim upon society than the perching of birds in the evening, they come to fall more and more under the domination of the mere attempt to describe themselves. They live under the protection of conversation, as many love affairs without a fixed meaning, without emotional space to occupy, come to rest in words. Their drama is one of trembling inner feeling and of the work to name the feeling.
Sue does have children—an inauthenticity for her. The children come under the doom of thought, of analysis. They die in the nihilistic suicide decision of Little Father Time, the watchful, brooding son of Arabella and Jude. Nothing seems more sadly consequent than that the tragedy should finally come to Sue, after the pain of it, as a challenge to principle, a blinding new condition in her struggle to give shape to her sense of things and of herself. She begins to go to church and gradually moves away from her old self to the decision that her original marriage to Phillotson has a remaining churchly validity and therefore the highest claim on her. She returns to him and also at last submits in every sense. An immolation. In this ending Sue is faithful to her passion for an examined life; for indeed religion is at least an idea for her, not a mere drifting. The necessity for this is pitiful and even if it seems to have a psychological truthfulness as the end of the road for one who has been utterly rejected by destiny, religion and the bed of Phillotson are for her a sort of coma that destroys the life of a living mind. The defeat of Sue is total.
1974
SAD BRAZIL
LARGENESS, magnitude, quantity; it is common to speak of Brazil as a “giant,” a phenomenon, spectacular, outrageously favored, and yet marked by the sluggishness of the greatly outsized. And if the giant is not quite on his feet, he is nevertheless thought of as rising from the thicket of sleep and the jungle of apathy, coming forth on some dawn to seize the waiting riches of the earth. This signaling, promissory vastness is the curse of the Brazilian imagination. Prophecies are like the rustling of great trees in a distant forest. They tell of a fabulous presence, still invisible, scarcely audible, and surely there, as possibility lying in the singular vastness.
Remember the opening of Tess of the D’Urbervilles? The father with his rickety legs, his empty egg basket, his patched hat brim, is addressed on the road as “Sir John” because it has been discovered that he is indeed a lineal representative of the ancient, noble family of the D’Urbervilles and thus he somehow includes what he cannot lay claim to. Brazil is a lineal descendant of Paradise, a remnant of the great garden of natural surfeit—a sweet, bountiful place sometime to be blessed. In Brazil the person lives surrounded by a mysterious, ineffable plenitude. He lives in a grand immensity and partakes of it as one partakes of pure spaciousness, of a magical placement in the scheme of nature. Small he may be, but the immensity is genuine. His own emptiness is close to the bone and yet his world is filled with the precious and semiprecious in prodigious quantity, with unknown glitters and granites, with sleeping minerals—silvery-white, ductile. These confer from their deep and gorgeous burial a special destiny. To say that Brazil is the land of dreams is a truth.
Rio Grande, Mato Grosso, Amazonas. Numbers enhance, although there is a dreamy stupefication about them also. Brazil is larger than the continental United States, excluding Alaska, and slightly larger than the bulk of Europe lying east of France. Its borders flow and curve and scallop to the Guianas, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Out of this encroaching, bordering, nudging sovereignty, life has a peculiar statistical consolation. Where there is isolation, loneliness, and backwardness, where the tangle of existence chokes with the complexity of blood and region, where torpor, negligence, and an old historical lassitude simply and finally confuse—there even the worst may be thought of as an unredeemed promise, not an implacable lack. Delay, not unalterable deprivation, is the worm in the heart of the rose.
•
Growth, exploitation, coming forth to meet modern possibility—a necessity, impatient, and oh, so maddeningly slow. The military rules partly under the banner of growth-mystical and its battle against the living is often represented in the name of growth-practical. The histrionic jungle, the romantic coffee and sugar plantations, the crazy rubber Babylon at Manaus with its ruins and the marble shards of the opera house, these last representing the old tropical slack, and, of course, misfortune: against the authoritarianism of nature, the police and political oppression takes on a private character of merely human vengeance, feeding upon itself insatiably.
A beggar, bereft, a scabby bundle of ancient Brazilian backwardness, a tatter of the rags, an eruption of the sores of underdevelopment; there he sits against an “old” 1920 wall of São Paulo. Without a doubt, he, shrunken as he is, salutes the punctured skyline, salutes the new buildings that from the air have the usual look of some vibrating necropolis of megalomaniac tombs and memorial shafts—all, like our own, en-shrouded in a thick, inhuman vapor, the vapor that sustains the alertness of all the world’s cities. Around the somnolent beggar the cars, with their attractive, volatile occupants, whir in a thick, migrating stream. Or come to a halt, the barrier created by themselves in multiplicity. And there it is, in the explosion of automobiles and their infinite signification, magic visible, quantity realized, things delivered.
Yes, all will be filled, all will be new, tall, thrusting, dominating, rapid, exhausting, outsized like the large, stalky watercress, the plump, round tasteless tomatoes grown by the inward, enduring will of the Japanese farmers. Everything new is
an emanation, sacred; and the “growth” is the inevitable mocking paradox, the challenge and puzzle and menace of almost every useful scrap of perpetual inventiveness. Brazil, beggars and all, has in movement something quick and almost preternaturally “modern” about it, something dashing and sleek and ironical. That is in movement; at rest and for the misbegotten it is old, lethargic, indifferent and casually destructive. The centuries seem to inhabit each moment; the diamonds at Minas, the slave ships, Dom Pedro in his summer palace at Petrópolis, the liberal tradition, the terrorists, the police, Vargas, Kubitschek, the Jesuits. All exist in a continuous present—a consciousness overcrowded and given to fatigue.
It is as it must be. There is no other way and the sun is very strong. In Brazil the presence of a great, green density, come upon like yet another gift to the over-laden, makes the soul yearn to create a gray, smooth highway. Thus Le Corbusier in 1929 saw Rio, radiant, and said, “I have a strong desire, a bit mad perhaps, to attempt here a human adventure—the desire to set up a duality, to create ‘the affirmation of man’ against or with ‘the presence of nature.’ ” The affirmation was to be a vast motor freeway and why not, since space turns the inspiration to engineering. The glory of Brazil is glory elsewhere, a vast junk heap of Volkswagens, their horns stuck for eternity. The imagination does not contain enough motor cars for the creative possibility of Brazilian spaciousness; indeed all contemporary manufacture, foolish or brilliantly unexpected, would find its happy and fitting rest here in the very up-to-date, end-of-the-century backwardness.
The new world rises from a hole in the ground where once stood a mustard-colored, decorated stucco with its small garden. Now, buildings, offices, hotels with their anxious dimensions that give, no matter, a kind of happiness to practicality and newness. In the swimming pools beautiful butterflies float in their blue-tiled graves. Birds, hammers, the high hum of traffic: the mellifluousness of the tropics.
•
The endless, blue shore lines. Life under the Great Southern Cross, Cruzeiro do Sul: under the blazing sky or the hanging humidity a resurrection of steel and concrete, a transfiguration of metals, of dollars and yen. And this year, death to students, to radicals and guerrillas, and a fear, very modern, up-to-date, of the teacher, the writer, the priest, the reporter, the political past. The pastoral, romantic, and romanticized world of Gilberto Freyre, with the masters and slaves in a humid commingling, the stately old prints of the family and servants in brilliant dresses and hairbands walking to the plantation chapel—where is that? The land and its murky history are buried under “methods,” and Nordic interrogations, and fresh words for the spirit of the times, “decompression,” and electric, motorized, screaming initials (DOPS, Department of Public Order and Safety). Words and “equipment” fill a vacancy, the hole in the heart of the Brazilian government. In the torrid air how cold is the claim of development.
I had been here in 1962 and now, 1974, I returned. Indeed it is impossible to forget the peculiarity and beauty of this rich and hungry country. Paradox is the soul of it. Droughts and floods, fertility and barrenness seem to reside in each individual citizen, creating an instability of spirit that is an allurement and a frustration, a mixture that was formerly sometimes thought of as feminine. It was the time of the installation of the new president, Geisel, under the military rule. Latin America’s wars are, for the most part, of the internal kind, the kind beyond armistice. Heavy police work that gives the generals time to run the country. General, the word itself appears to be a sort of validation, a kind of Ph.D. without which General Perón and General Pinochet might have appeared to be mere citizens presuming.
Geisel, the new president of this land of color—olive, black, mixed, European, Indian, reddish-brown like dried flowers—turned out to be a lunar curiosity thrown down from some wintry, arctic, celestial disturbance. He is thin and colorless, as ice is colorless. A fantastical ice, solid in the heat of the country. No claim to please, astonish, nothing of the cockatoo or macaw. Dark glasses shield the glacial face, as if wishing to filter the tropical light and darken the glow of the chaos of bereft persons, the insects, slums, French fashions, old ports at Bahia and Recife—the brilliant, irredeemable landscape.
Is there symbolism in the whiteness of the leader? He is not, as we would view it, the will of the people, but Will itself. Will set against underdevelopment, against the sheer obstruction everywhere, and so much of it one’s fellow beings.
A small card sent out by the family of a young student killed by the police:
Consummatus in brevi, explecit tempora multa
Tendo vivido pouco, cumpriu a tarefa de una longa existencia. Profundamente sensibilizada, a familia de jose carlos novais da mata-machado agradece a solidariedade recebida por ocasian da sua morta.
(Having lived little [1946–1973] he accomplished the task of a long existence.)
The pictorial in Brazil consumes the imagination; leaf and scrub, seaside and treacherous inlands long for their apotheosis as word. Otherwise it is as if a great part of the nation lay silent, unrealized. Your own sense of yourself is threatened here and speculative description seizes the mind. A landscape drenched in philosophical questions finds its masterpiece in the great Brazilian prose epic, Os Sertões, translated into English by Samuel Putnam as Rebellion in the Backlands.
A Brazilian newspaper around the turn of the century noted: “There has appeared in the northern backlands an individual who goes by the name of Antônio Conselheiro, and who exerts a great influence over the minds of the lower orders, making use of his mysterious trappings and ascetic habits to impose upon their ignorance and simplicity. He lets his hair grow long, wears a cotton tunic, and eats sparingly, being almost a mummy in aspect.”
The appearance of the deranged evangelist, “a crude gnostic,” and his gathering about him a settlement of backlands people in the town of Canudos in the northeast was the occasion for military campaigns sent out from Bahia in 1896 and 1897 in order to subdue the supposed threat of the Conselheiro and his followers to the new Republic. Euclides da Cunha went on the campaigns as a journalist and what he returned with and published in 1902 is still unsurpassed in Latin American literature.
Cunha is a talent as grand, spacious, entangled with knowledge, curiosity, and bafflement as the country itself. The ragged, impenetrable Conselheiro is himself a novel, with his tortured beginnings as Antônio Maciel, his disastrous marriage, and his transformation as a wandering anchorite, solitary and violently ascetic in habit. His distorted Catholicism, his odd prophecies (“In 1898 there will be many hats and few heads”), and prediction of the return of the monarchy “with all his army from the waves of the sea,” attracted ragged followers and he made his way north to Canudos.
The campaigns against the Conselheiro are the occasion for the book, the center from which Cunha engages Brazil itself and the nature of its people. Even to his great mind it is a mystery, a mestizo mystery of contradictions of blood, of north and south, backland and coast, soil, temperament, climate, destiny.
In the campaign Cunha is struck by the unknown country, his own, by the relentless conundrums of race and space, by the very nature of the forgotten, lost, unnamed—in the sense of undescribed, uncontemplated—population of the northeast. The horsemen and cattlemen have lived in a long isolation from history, lived amid the destroying natural vicissitudes this part of the Edenic promise can provide. The people of the northeast are strong and weak, superstitious and crafty, backward and yet a large, “natural,” product of peculiar Brazilian history.
As the author sees it, the backland people are under the misfortune of the country’s haunting mestizo heritage, a racial mixture of African, Indian, and European, cut off from the “opulent placidity” of the south. They are “atavistic”—and still Brazil itself. He describes the land and the people with a passionate curiosity that is without condescension. Instead there is an obsessive quality to his exploration of psychological and environmental detail. On every page there is
a heat of idea, speculation, dramatic observation that tells of a creative mission undertaken, the identity of the nation, and also the creation of a pure and eloquent prose style. Everything interests him, the scrub, the flora and fauna, the temperatures, the posture of the men, the clothes, the way they sit on a horse, the droughts, well-known and always unprepared for, the separation of types within the backlands and their ways.
When the soldiers from Bahia, themselves of the same mestizo stock as the backlanders, set out on their campaigns they have no idea where they are going, except that they are to reach a rebellious settlement in a town by the name of Canudos. They have their equipment and no premonition of the guerrilla warfare that will meet them. They go off in their brilliant, somewhat Napoleonic uniforms to encounter the heat of the day and the dampness at night and the horror of the thick scrub. “In the backlands, even prior to the midsummer season, it is impossible for fully equipped men, laden down with their knapsacks and canteens, to do any marching after ten o’clock in the morning.”
In the end it took four campaigns and ten months of fighting before the settlement of fifty-two-hundred houses and all of the people, each one, was destroyed. Cunha sees the campaign as “an act of crime and madness,” and worse, as the destruction of “the very core of our nationality.” It was “the bedrock of our race, which our troops were attacking here, and dynamite was the means precisely suited. It was at once a recognition and a consecration.”
The dramatic, unreal, deranged image of the poor Conselheiro prevails over the final charred scene. His corpse, “clothed in his old blue canvas tunic, his face swollen and hideous, the deep-sunken eyes filled with dirt,” was “the sole prize, the only spoils the conflict had to offer.” At last the corpse was dug up from its shallow trench, decapitated, and “after that they took it to the seaboard, where it was greeted by multitudes with delirious joy.”
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 27