Paulo Francis
Encyclopedia
Paulo Francis was a Brazil
ian journalist
, political pundit, novelist and critic
.
A controversial personality, Francis became prominent in modern Brazilian journalism through his critiques and essays in his trademark writing style - a mixture of erudition and vulgarity. As many other Brazilian intellectuals of his time, Francis was exposed to Americanization
during his teens, and in his early career tried to blend Brazilian Nationalist Leftism in Culture and Politics with the ideal of modernity
embodied in the USA. Early in his career, he acted mostly as an advocate of Modernism
in cultural matters, later becoming embroiled in Brazilian 1960s political struggles as a Trotskyist sympathizer and a Leftist nationalist. As an expatriate in the US, during the 1980s he forsook Leftism for Americanism's sake, performing a sharp political turn and becoming an aggressive conservative
, a defender of the Free Market and political liberalism
, and an uncompromising anti-Leftist. In this capacity, he stranged himself from Brazilian intelligentisia and became mostly a Media figure, a role in which he would be embroiled in a legal suit amid which his life would come to a close. Critical evaluations of his work were made mostly by Midia scholar Bernardo Kucinski and historian Isabel Lustosa.
descent, Francis received his early education in various traditional Catholic
schools in Rio de Janeiro, afterwards attending classes at the National School of Philosophy (at the time a general humanities course) of the University of Brazil in the 1950s. In college, he was admitted into the student troupe (Teatro do Estudante) managed by the critic Paschoal Carlos Magno, with whom he toured Northeastern Brazil. On the trip he was shocked and disgusted by what he found: "...malnourishment, poverty, backwardness, [and an] unawareness of welfare and civil society".
Inspired to follow a career on the stage after that trip, Francis tried his hand as an actor in Rio de Janeiro during the early 1950s.Although he received an award as a rising star in 1952, he did not pursue the career: according to Kucisnki, through lack of talent; according to his former mentor Paschoal Carlos Magno, because his talents lay elsewhere: "I must say that for a man with Francis' abilities and world-views it was very difficult to be an actor".And indeed, from the very beginning Francis saw himself not as an entertainer, but as a public intellectual intent on social change; in his own words, he had returned from his Northeastern Brazil tour "sure of the need for a social revolution".
Deciding on a stage management career, Francis went to Columbia University
, where he entered graduate classes in Dramatic Literature, mostly attending the classes of the Brecht
scholar Eric Bentley
, as well as becoming acquainted with the work of the critic George Jean Nathan
. Eventually he dropped out from Columbia — he had already dropped out from his undergraduate studies in Rio, a subject he never referred to publicly.
During his American stay, Francis joined the host of Brazilian intellectuals who during the 1940s and the 1950s forswore any abstract and aristocratic European concept of "civilization" - meaning mostly French Belle Époque
culture - in favor of an American model, which equated modernization with cutting-edge technological development (Fordism
) and mass democracy - understood as the necessary material basis for social change. Something he expressed in a mix of pro-Americanism and Left radicalism.
His embrace of what he saw as American pragmatism led Francis into a lifelong militant empiricism
and scorn for theory. According to Kucinski, Francis would always be open about his boredom with the academic method of intellectual analysis, describing it as conventional and unimaginative. He preferred the swift and witty commentary. In the words of one of his critics, psychoanalist and writer Maria Rita Kehl, "Francis never doubts, he has understood everything even before realizing what actually happened". He was also repelled by what he saw as the rhetorical obscurity of 1960s Structuralism
, striving instead for "a simple, learned prose, with a clear language".In a late interview, he would proudly describe himself as "not [being] a scholar who pens treatises.I'm a journalist who discusses on the facts of the day, political and cultural happenings".
This mode of work, according to critics such as Kehl and Kucinski, would shape his writing to the end. These same critics would see in it a signal of an inability to perform sustained intellectual work and a tendency to rely on flashes of wit and borrowed erudition (the use of incessant quotes and bon mots) something that would make him prone to "mistakes, imprecision and garbled recollections." According to Kucinski, his "absence of careful research, established facts, precise information [...] became eventually - through excessive generalization and lack of patience [...] - downright bigotry".
His acquaintance with contemporary American criticism had prepared him for the important role he was to play in Brazilian theater, which was at the time in a feverish process of cultural modernization; mostly in the sense of a thorough Americanization
of cultural values. This process had begun after the late 1945 fall of the Getúlio Vargas
dictatorship, and was to last until the 1964 military coup. After a time as a director between 1954 and 1956 during which he staged five plays, with moderate success, Francis started in 1957 to write as a theater critic for the newspaper Diário Carioca. He was soon praised for his defence of a modern approach to staging. The Brazilian stage had been characterised by a provincial bickering between rival troupes, as well as to an strict attachment to Classic European conventions. With various other critics, such as the theater scholar Sabato Magaldi and the Shakespeare translator and expert, Barbara Heliodora, Francis strived for a kind of social and psychological realism on the Brazilian stage, expressed in his association of Brecht's work to George Bernard Shaw
's and Sean O'Casey
's (ignoring, in the process, the anti-realist stance of Brechtian theater and submitting it to method acting
conventions). In his own words, what he proposed was to approach staging as above all, an intellectual task: "to strive, on the stage, to find an equivalent for the feeling of unity and total expression one finds while reading a text".At the same time, he sponsored, with editor Jorge Zahar, the publication of a collection of translation of foreign plays that would form a canon on which a future Brazilian modernist dramaturgy would develop.
Within this intellectual framework, Francis acted as a cultural nationalist who supported contemporary rising Brazilian playwrights such as Nelson Rodrigues
and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri
and actors such as Fernanda Montenegro
and was generally respected for doing so. However, he remained noted for his compulsion towards unconsidered behavior and personal attack, as in a quarrel with an actress during 1958 in which he reacted to what he supposed to be a hint about his (supposed) homosexuality
by penning so demeaning a piece of libel that it got him slapped in public by the actress' husband.
. There he published stories by at the time little-known writers such as Clarice Lispector
and Guimarães Rosa.
In the climate of heady political debate that characterized the early Cold War
era in Brazil, Francis styled himself a Trotskyist. Although he was never a member of the various Trotskyist organizations existing at the time, he was a friend of various former members of the 1930s Brazilian section of the International Left Opposition, such as Mário Pedrosa and Edmundo Moniz. It was as a maverick, non-Stalinist, Left-leaning intellectual that he was invited in 1963 to write a political column
in the Leftist Vargoist
paper Última Hora, where he became known for his radical views. There he advocated for a nationalist Left-reformist agenda (land and franchise reforms and the strenghthening of foreign investment controls), advising the Left to support the João Goulart
government by means of a strategy of pressure "from below" - i.e. banking on the grassroots mobilization of the broad masses against what he saw as a mostly reactionary Parliament. In short, he supported a kind of radical populism
that would eventually break the framework of parliamentary inaction and introduce radical reforming.
At the time professing to have joined one of the paramilitary "groups of eleven" being organized by maverick leftist leader Leonel Brizola
, Francis fell out of favor after Goulart's fall in 1964, being eventually banned from the mainstream press. In 1967, however, he edited the cultural supplement of Correio da Manhã
, a major newspaper that would be wound down by the dictatorship in early 1969.
Francis earned a living during the late 1960s mostly as a freelancer, penning contributions for Abril
monthly Realidade, acting as a consultant for Editora Civilização Brasileira, editing Revista Diners (a house organ distributed free of charge to Brazil subscibers of the Diners Club credit card) and writing for various minor papers and magazines, especially the satirical weekly O Pasquim
and the daily Tribuna da Imprensa. He wrote mostly about international affairs, and manifestly opposed against the Vietnam War
, flouting the official pro-American sympathies of the military government in texts considered so uncharacteristically sober that they later produced a remark from Kucinski that "only then he became a real mentsch". In the wake of the late 1968 "coup inside the coup" — the takeover of the already existing military dictatorship by more radical generals — he was arrested four times, on the slimmest of pretexts.
After deciding to live abroad in order to escape political harassment, Francis moved to the US, a move favoured by his previous upbringing in Columbia, his enduring Trotskyist sympathies (and therefore alienation towards the Stalinist Left of the time), and his actual American connections, such as his acquaintance with diplomat John Mowinckel. He moved in late 1971 to New York City
as an international correspondent
, on a Ford Foundation
fellowship
. There he assumed a position highly critical of the Richard Nixon
administration, offering qualified support to the George McGovern
candidacy in the 1972 US presidential election, assuming that McGovern's "naive reformism" offered neverthless a way out of the frozen consensus around Nixon. Late the same year, he published an essay in Portuguese that offered a continuous account of the said elections: Nixon vs. McGovern: as Duas Américas. After 1976, he began working exclusively for the major paper Folha de São Paulo, then under the editorship of the Trotskyist cadre and famed editor Cláudio Abramo
.
, to shun what he saw as the populist
streak of Brazilian modern fiction i.e., the portrayal of the lives of the rural lower and/or higher classes typical of later Brazilian modernist
authors such as Érico Veríssimo
, Jorge Amado
or Graciliano Ramos
. He chose instead the description of life among the happy few in 1960s–1970s Rio ("the elite of the charming parochialism of Rio de Janeiro [fashionable boroughs], their parties and sensual pleasures") —a project reminiscent not only of James Joyce, but also of Scott Fitzgerald
. By the same token, he associated his embrace of modernist stylish conventions (juxtaposition
, non-linear narration) to the necessity of portraying an emerging urban Brazil.
The first novel, Cabeça de Papel (Paperhead, a pun with a Brazilian nursery rhyme), a mix between a memoir and spy thriller, was published in Brazil in 1977. In 1979, he published a sequel, Cabeça de Negro (also a pun, this time with the name of a kind of homemade firework called "black man's head")- which was intended as a thriller and also as one of the various 1970s memorial novels that chronicled the armed underground struggle against the Brazilian military dictatorship. Both novels were moderate sales success and critical failures. Brazilian scholars with both an academic or journalistic background criticised Francis' writing for sloppiness; the literary critic José Guilherme Merquior
even said he simply had shunned reading one of Francis' novels to the end for its plain want of literary qualities. Other critics, however, like the writer Silvano Santiago, maintained that Francis' apparent lack of stylish qualities simply meant that he, like many others, simply felt the imprint of the times: in the absence of open public debate, it was unavoidable that literature would assume a parajournalistic function aimed at a transposition of the real. According to the prominent Austro-Brazilian critic Otto Maria Carpeaux
, what Francis' novels offered was information "about a fringe of Brazilian society that snorts lines
and stays drunk" and "an out of focus look at a seaside [i.e. fashionable] swathe of our age". Francis replied to his critics' restrictions in his usually vitriolic fashion by calling them "smarties who adopt the blurbs of foreign books [as their own] in order to make themselves a career [...] the plague of university professors in Brazil is more serious than the Black Death
in the Middle Ages"
Francis was also criticized for an alleged lack of depth in his political and cultural commentaries and confusion arising from his attempt at melding the Joycean stream of consciousness with the plot of a spy thriller, or, in the words of a paper critic for Folha de São Paulo, Vinicius Torres Filho, for producing in his novels something like "a watered-down Graham Greene
, betraying the ridiculous obsession, [proper to those] who came of age at the beginning of the Cold War, to think of themselves as sophisticated [...] for seeing conspiracies and spies everywhere". The same critics also pointed to the patchy plot of Francis' novels and his shallow digressions - in which the writer showed a weakness for incessant quotes and untimely comment, which, despite their undeniable charm showed an author who simply couldn't refrain from offering his erudition in a showcase to the prospective reader. This alleged self-centered character of his fictions made literary critic João Luiz Lafetá declare that Francis had intended to write about the anatomy of the Brazilian ruling class but had written only about his (dependent) position towards it as an intellectual.
However, what these same critics acknowledged as the greatest achievement of the two novels was Francis's "stylistics of mockery" (retórica da esculhambação): his grammatically incorrect phrasing, polyglot vocabulary and confused mix between the erudite and the downright vulgar. In a pithy description, his was "a messy(avacalhada), aggressive rhetoric, in itself a critique of the pompous logorrhea and mystification [proper to Brazilian ruling elites]". However, despite the author's avowed leftism at the time, the American literary scholar Malcolm Silvermann considered his tone to be already that of a nihilist
: in the words this same critic, what every character in Francis' novels displayed - irrespective of political affiliation - was the same "careless erotico-politic debauchery, conspicuous consuming, belligerent use of obscenities and a general disdain for everyone". Such was an outward manifestation of a deeper process that affected Francis as well as other Brazilian Left intellectuals of the time: a general feeling of disenchantment that eventually found a solution in the most extreme aggression directed toward earlier ideals.
After the joint publication, in 1982, of two novellas under the title Filhas do Segundo Sexo ("Children of the Second Sex") - an attempt at tackling the issue of middle-class female emancipation and at the same time at plain language feuilleton
- which was very ill-received by both critics and public, Francis stopped publishing fiction. Eleven years after his death, a new novel, left by Francis as a draft, was to be published after being edited by his widow: Carne Viva ("Open Wound"), where the author tried, again, to portray the lives of the wealthy and sophisticated in between a mythical 1960s Rio de Janeiro and an equally mythical French May — something that led critic Vinícius Torres Freire, in Folha de São Paulo, to state that Francis had left only a memoir about the kitsch
character of his usual snobbery.
), in which he confirmed his Marxist beliefs. Shortly afterwards, however, he made a sharp and sudden turn from Trotskyism to conservative views. A gulf developed between him and the Left in the Brazilian intellectual and political scene, during the demise of the military dictatorship and after, with Francis hurling insults from New York at various academics and politicians, and especially at the Workers' Party
, which in the post-dictatorship democracy quickly became the dominant Brazilian leftist party. According to one of his critics, "He chose his targets carefully and used the most sordid adjectives. The choicest targets were mostly the leaders of popular movements, the Left, specially the WP, writers and scholars, whom he smeared by name, without subtlety".
Various reasons were offered for this shift, that was made before the demise of "currently existing socialism": the media scholar Kucinski talks about disenchantment and alienation; some fellow journalists propose plain objective interest, noting that Francis, in the early 1980s, had lobbied covertly in his column for private business interests. Others argue for vanity at hobnobbing with Establishment figures. He was also criticised for having little understanding of the Brazilian realities, commenting on Brazil while living abroad - as well as feigning an acquaintance with the New York intellectual milieu which, according to the same critics, he didn't actually possess.
Other authors, however, such as historian Isabel Lustosa, have a different explanation: as a Left intellectual, Francis had already nurtured a deep-seated cultural elitism
, as well as a loathing for the emergence of the so-called new social movements
, a loathing expressed, for instance, in his lifelong misogyny
. His uncompromising anti-feminism caused him to be snubbed by the American poetess Adrienne Rich
.For Francis, leftism represented above all a means to an end: the social modernization and political democratization of Brazilian society - which ultimately meant embracing mainstream American values and American culture. In Lustosa's words, Francis' opposition to an autarkic
Brazilian cultural nationalism was such as to eventually decide him to be "rather the last in the Court than the first in the backwater". Even before the 1964 military coup, Francis had decided to support Goulart's government only to the extent that Goulart stoood for a modernizing agenda, in which "the populist politico of yesterday became the historical agent of today".
In later years, Francis came to express a fear that the emergence of a grassroots, mass, trade-union-based and anti-intellectual Left politics such as that which the Workers' Party represented, meant the risk that Brazil and the Brazilians could distance themselves from "our cultural heritage [sic] which is the West, the USA". His increasing disgust with Brazilian society at large, fostered by the failure of the Left to prevent the 1964 military coup as well as his growing sense of alienation from Brazilian politics, also could have had a role at his ideological volteface. Even in the 1960s, commenting on a novel by his friend Carlos Heitor Cony
, Francis had pondered on the incompatibility between the activity of the intellectuals and general Brazilian society. In a way, Francis' political rightward shift was an emotional rejection of the backwardness which he came to identify with all things Brazilian ("the climate abominable, the culture a desert, the food excessive and wretched, the political environment unbearable").) Such an a priori rejection, as it was, needed not be very intellectually developed: in a 1994 interview, Francis offered as a reason for his shift a 1970s trip to the American Midwest, "the industrial center of the country" where he allegedly had seen "nothing to equal it, in the way of progress and workers' welfare".
These and similar views justified opinions such as the one expressed later, in one of Francis' obituaries, by his late political friend and former Minister of Planning of the Castelo Branco
dictatorial government Roberto Campos: Francis' columns were intellectually worthless, but made nevertheless good propaganda, as they were "a weird bouquet of [...] economic guesswork...[But then] there are many writers but few able to box for ideas". Such views, were, in themselves, very simple, consisting in an extreme and shallow variety of Marxist historicism
-cum-Reaganian
supply-side economics
: in order to liberate the forces of production and develop Brazil, it was, in his view, necessary "to surrender the country to people who want and know how to make money - private capital". An essay published in 1985, O Brasil no Mundo, identifying Brazilian authoritarianism with an absence of Capitalism, expressed this ideological shift. In his last book, Trinta Anos Esta Noite (1994), a memoir published on the 30th anniversary of the 1964 coup, he would argue that a socialist transformnation of Brazilian society at the time was unachievable, and that Brazil should develop into the American sphere of influence.
Such ideas would eventually express themselves in a kind of bigotry
with ever more markedly racist overtones, directed against "Mediterranean peoples, blacks, poor folk of all hues, Northeastern Brazilians". This trend began with a 1988 column directed against the then Workers' Party candidate to the São Paulo mayorship Luiza Erundina
, a female from rural Northeastern Brazil whom he described as a "beefy gentleman", a "hottie", and whose prospects of winning the election he described with a Joseph Conrad
quote ("the horror, the horror"). This kind of abuse eventually procured Francis a doubtful fame, built around his various scandalous smears, such as when he expressed his desire to have the WP MP-cum-unionist, the Afro-Brazilian Vicentinho, "whipped as a slave". In another of his pithy statements, he stated that "the discovery [sic] of the clarinet
by Mozart was a greater contribution than anything Africa gave us until today". When President Fernando Collor
created a Ya̧nomamö Park in Brazil, he wrote that this was the gesture of someone who gave "land in abundance" to a people who "weren't even of use as slaves". In a 1990s column, he would write - in a statement described as "insensitive" by an American historian - that "Brazilian political problems stemmed from the stranglehold of northeastern elites".
Paulo Francis was attacked by many of his former associates, and the number of disputes in which he became involved heightened his fame as a controversial journalist. Many of these polemics became, in themselves, pop culture events, as was the case of the show of mutual animosity between him and the popular composer Caetano Veloso
. From 1979 on, he worked as a TV commentator for Rede Globo
—something that was in itself a telling proof of his political shift, as he had during the dictatorship charged the Globo boss Roberto Marinho
with manipulating information in order to have him banished from Brazil. Also, after a heated dispute with the newspaper ombudsman
of Folha de São Paulo Caio Túlio Costa — mostly over Francis' repeated insulting of the then WP's presidential candidate and future president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva,whom Francis had described as "[an individual] named after an octopus and an [association football] Left winger, a half-illiterate with the discreet charm of the Proletariat". Costa also pointed to Francis' racism
Francis left the Folha during 1991 and began writing his column for the O Estado de São Paulo.
As a television commentator, Francis quickly became a pop culture phenomenon, playing the persona of the pundit always ready to offer a stinging comment in a basso voice—earning him various impersonators on Brazilian TV. This public persona, regarded by some as a caricature of himself, was often criticised as having a less-than-ideal regard for factual truth: according to an anecdote told by one of his friends, when Francis was still working for Folha de São Paulo, one reporter, charged with revising his column, approached the then editor-in-chief of the paper, Boris Casoy
, saying that "Francis' numbers do not check with truth", to which the editor - known for his rightist political stands - replied "Sonny, it's your numbers that must check with reality; Francis' numbers needn't".
, who, reacting to Francis' disparaging comments on a bill he had presented on the restructuring of Brazil's education system, called him a neogringo
and charged him with lobbying for private universities' interests: "Francis is no innocent, his news is neither information nor opinion, but a task on behalf of interest groups". Late this year, an entire book was published listing and describing various cases of his supposed plagiarisms and abuses.
The last controversial act in which Paulo Francis was involved was an early 1997 attack, on cable TV, on the management of Brazilian state-owned oil corporation Petrobras
as dishonest. Francis also claimed that its directors had US$50 million stashed in a Swiss bank account
. After Francis’ statements, Petrobras’ management sued him for libel before an American court, enabled by the fact that the show was broadcast in the US to Brazilian cable TV subscribers. Soon after, he suffered a fatal heart attack, dying in New York on February 4, 1997. He was buried in Rio de Janeiro, and was survived by his wife, fellow journalist Sonia Nolasco.
According to his personal friend, political columnist Élio Gaspari, Francis had approached then-senator José Serra
, who supposedly asked President Fernando Henrique Cardoso
to see that the directors of Petrobras drop the lawsuit against Francis—to no avail, President Cardoso chose to say nothing.
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
ian journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, political pundit, novelist and critic
Critic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...
.
A controversial personality, Francis became prominent in modern Brazilian journalism through his critiques and essays in his trademark writing style - a mixture of erudition and vulgarity. As many other Brazilian intellectuals of his time, Francis was exposed to Americanization
Americanization
Americanization is the influence of the United States on the popular culture, technology, business practices, or political techniques of other countries. The term has been used since at least 1907. Inside the U.S...
during his teens, and in his early career tried to blend Brazilian Nationalist Leftism in Culture and Politics with the ideal of modernity
Modernity
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
embodied in the USA. Early in his career, he acted mostly as an advocate of Modernism
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
in cultural matters, later becoming embroiled in Brazilian 1960s political struggles as a Trotskyist sympathizer and a Leftist nationalist. As an expatriate in the US, during the 1980s he forsook Leftism for Americanism's sake, performing a sharp political turn and becoming an aggressive conservative
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
, a defender of the Free Market and political liberalism
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
, and an uncompromising anti-Leftist. In this capacity, he stranged himself from Brazilian intelligentisia and became mostly a Media figure, a role in which he would be embroiled in a legal suit amid which his life would come to a close. Critical evaluations of his work were made mostly by Midia scholar Bernardo Kucinski and historian Isabel Lustosa.
Early life and career (1930-1964)
Born Franz Paul Trannin da Matta Heilborn into a middle-class family of GermanGermany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
descent, Francis received his early education in various traditional Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
schools in Rio de Janeiro, afterwards attending classes at the National School of Philosophy (at the time a general humanities course) of the University of Brazil in the 1950s. In college, he was admitted into the student troupe (Teatro do Estudante) managed by the critic Paschoal Carlos Magno, with whom he toured Northeastern Brazil. On the trip he was shocked and disgusted by what he found: "...malnourishment, poverty, backwardness, [and an] unawareness of welfare and civil society".
Inspired to follow a career on the stage after that trip, Francis tried his hand as an actor in Rio de Janeiro during the early 1950s.Although he received an award as a rising star in 1952, he did not pursue the career: according to Kucisnki, through lack of talent; according to his former mentor Paschoal Carlos Magno, because his talents lay elsewhere: "I must say that for a man with Francis' abilities and world-views it was very difficult to be an actor".And indeed, from the very beginning Francis saw himself not as an entertainer, but as a public intellectual intent on social change; in his own words, he had returned from his Northeastern Brazil tour "sure of the need for a social revolution".
Deciding on a stage management career, Francis went to Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, where he entered graduate classes in Dramatic Literature, mostly attending the classes of the Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
scholar Eric Bentley
Eric Bentley
Eric Bentley is a critic, playwright, singer, editor and translator. He became an American citizen in 1948, and currently lives in New York City...
, as well as becoming acquainted with the work of the critic George Jean Nathan
George Jean Nathan
George Jean Nathan was an American drama critic and editor.-Early life:Nathan was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana...
. Eventually he dropped out from Columbia — he had already dropped out from his undergraduate studies in Rio, a subject he never referred to publicly.
During his American stay, Francis joined the host of Brazilian intellectuals who during the 1940s and the 1950s forswore any abstract and aristocratic European concept of "civilization" - meaning mostly French Belle Époque
Belle Époque
The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque was a period in European social history that began during the late 19th century and lasted until World War I. Occurring during the era of the French Third Republic and the German Empire, it was a period characterised by optimism and new technological and medical...
culture - in favor of an American model, which equated modernization with cutting-edge technological development (Fordism
Fordism
Fordism, named after Henry Ford, is a modern economic and social system based on industrial mass production. The concept is used in various social theories about production and related socio-economic phenomena. It has varying but related meanings in different fields, as well as for Marxist and...
) and mass democracy - understood as the necessary material basis for social change. Something he expressed in a mix of pro-Americanism and Left radicalism.
His embrace of what he saw as American pragmatism led Francis into a lifelong militant empiricism
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
and scorn for theory. According to Kucinski, Francis would always be open about his boredom with the academic method of intellectual analysis, describing it as conventional and unimaginative. He preferred the swift and witty commentary. In the words of one of his critics, psychoanalist and writer Maria Rita Kehl, "Francis never doubts, he has understood everything even before realizing what actually happened". He was also repelled by what he saw as the rhetorical obscurity of 1960s Structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
, striving instead for "a simple, learned prose, with a clear language".In a late interview, he would proudly describe himself as "not [being] a scholar who pens treatises.I'm a journalist who discusses on the facts of the day, political and cultural happenings".
This mode of work, according to critics such as Kehl and Kucinski, would shape his writing to the end. These same critics would see in it a signal of an inability to perform sustained intellectual work and a tendency to rely on flashes of wit and borrowed erudition (the use of incessant quotes and bon mots) something that would make him prone to "mistakes, imprecision and garbled recollections." According to Kucinski, his "absence of careful research, established facts, precise information [...] became eventually - through excessive generalization and lack of patience [...] - downright bigotry".
His acquaintance with contemporary American criticism had prepared him for the important role he was to play in Brazilian theater, which was at the time in a feverish process of cultural modernization; mostly in the sense of a thorough Americanization
Americanization
Americanization is the influence of the United States on the popular culture, technology, business practices, or political techniques of other countries. The term has been used since at least 1907. Inside the U.S...
of cultural values. This process had begun after the late 1945 fall of the Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas served as President of Brazil, first as dictator, from 1930 to 1945, and in a democratically elected term from 1951 until his suicide in 1954. Vargas led Brazil for 18 years, the most for any President, and second in Brazilian history to Emperor Pedro II...
dictatorship, and was to last until the 1964 military coup. After a time as a director between 1954 and 1956 during which he staged five plays, with moderate success, Francis started in 1957 to write as a theater critic for the newspaper Diário Carioca. He was soon praised for his defence of a modern approach to staging. The Brazilian stage had been characterised by a provincial bickering between rival troupes, as well as to an strict attachment to Classic European conventions. With various other critics, such as the theater scholar Sabato Magaldi and the Shakespeare translator and expert, Barbara Heliodora, Francis strived for a kind of social and psychological realism on the Brazilian stage, expressed in his association of Brecht's work to George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
's and Sean O'Casey
Seán O'Casey
Seán O'Casey was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.- Early life:...
's (ignoring, in the process, the anti-realist stance of Brechtian theater and submitting it to method acting
Method acting
Method acting is a phrase that loosely refers to a family of techniques used by actors to create in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters, so as to develop lifelike performances...
conventions). In his own words, what he proposed was to approach staging as above all, an intellectual task: "to strive, on the stage, to find an equivalent for the feeling of unity and total expression one finds while reading a text".At the same time, he sponsored, with editor Jorge Zahar, the publication of a collection of translation of foreign plays that would form a canon on which a future Brazilian modernist dramaturgy would develop.
Within this intellectual framework, Francis acted as a cultural nationalist who supported contemporary rising Brazilian playwrights such as Nelson Rodrigues
Nélson Rodrigues
Nelson Falcão Rodrigues was a Brazilian playwright, journalist and novelist. In 1943, he helped usher in a new era in Brazilian theater with his play Vestido de Noiva , considered revolutionary for the complex exploration of its characters' psychology and its use of colloquial dialog...
and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri
Gianfrancesco Guarnieri
Gianfrancesco Sigfrido Benedetto Marinenghi de Guarnieri was a Brazilian actor and playwright.- External links :...
and actors such as Fernanda Montenegro
Fernanda Montenegro
Fernanda Montenegro is a Brazilian stage, television and film actress, mostly recognized for her leading role in Central Station, which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Brazilian actor to be nominated.She is commonly revered as one of Brazil's finest...
and was generally respected for doing so. However, he remained noted for his compulsion towards unconsidered behavior and personal attack, as in a quarrel with an actress during 1958 in which he reacted to what he supposed to be a hint about his (supposed) homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
by penning so demeaning a piece of libel that it got him slapped in public by the actress' husband.
The middle years: Radical journalism and fiction-writing (1964–1979)
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Francis worked mostly as a culture and literary critic. Between 1959 and 1962 he was an editor (alongside Nahum Sirotsky) of the culture magazine Senhor, a mostly literary magazine praised for the quality of its contributors as well as for its innovative graphic design created by Bea FeitlerBea Feitler
Beatriz Feitler , was a Brazilian designer and art director best known for her work in Harper's Bazaar, Ms., Rolling Stone and the premiere issue of the modern Vanity Fair.-Early life, education and early career:...
. There he published stories by at the time little-known writers such as Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist...
and Guimarães Rosa.
In the climate of heady political debate that characterized the early Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
era in Brazil, Francis styled himself a Trotskyist. Although he was never a member of the various Trotskyist organizations existing at the time, he was a friend of various former members of the 1930s Brazilian section of the International Left Opposition, such as Mário Pedrosa and Edmundo Moniz. It was as a maverick, non-Stalinist, Left-leaning intellectual that he was invited in 1963 to write a political column
Column (newspaper)
A column is a recurring piece or article in a newspaper, magazine or other publication. Columns are written by columnists.What differentiates a column from other forms of journalism is that it meets each of the following criteria:...
in the Leftist Vargoist
Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas served as President of Brazil, first as dictator, from 1930 to 1945, and in a democratically elected term from 1951 until his suicide in 1954. Vargas led Brazil for 18 years, the most for any President, and second in Brazilian history to Emperor Pedro II...
paper Última Hora, where he became known for his radical views. There he advocated for a nationalist Left-reformist agenda (land and franchise reforms and the strenghthening of foreign investment controls), advising the Left to support the João Goulart
João Goulart
João Belchior Marques Goulart was a Brazilian politician and the 24th President of Brazil until a military coup d'état deposed him on April 1, 1964. He is considered to have been the last left-wing President of the country until Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2003.-Name:João Goulart is...
government by means of a strategy of pressure "from below" - i.e. banking on the grassroots mobilization of the broad masses against what he saw as a mostly reactionary Parliament. In short, he supported a kind of radical populism
Populism
Populism can be defined as an ideology, political philosophy, or type of discourse. Generally, a common theme compares "the people" against "the elite", and urges social and political system changes. It can also be defined as a rhetorical style employed by members of various political or social...
that would eventually break the framework of parliamentary inaction and introduce radical reforming.
At the time professing to have joined one of the paramilitary "groups of eleven" being organized by maverick leftist leader Leonel Brizola
Leonel Brizola
Leonel de Moura Brizola was a Brazilian politician. Launched in politics by Getúlio Vargas, Brizola was the only politician to serve as governor of two different states in the whole history of Brazil. In 1959 he was elected governor of Rio Grande do Sul, and in 1982 and 1990 he was elected...
, Francis fell out of favor after Goulart's fall in 1964, being eventually banned from the mainstream press. In 1967, however, he edited the cultural supplement of Correio da Manhã
Correio da Manhã (Brazil)
Correio da Manhã was a Brazilian daily newspaper, published in Rio de Janeiro, from June 5, 1901 to July 8, 1974. It was an important part of the Brazilian press during most of its run...
, a major newspaper that would be wound down by the dictatorship in early 1969.
Francis earned a living during the late 1960s mostly as a freelancer, penning contributions for Abril
Grupo Abril
Grupo Abril is the second largest Brazilian media conglomerate with its headquarter in São Paulo. The group is the holding company of Editora Abril, who publishes the weekly newsmagazine Veja....
monthly Realidade, acting as a consultant for Editora Civilização Brasileira, editing Revista Diners (a house organ distributed free of charge to Brazil subscibers of the Diners Club credit card) and writing for various minor papers and magazines, especially the satirical weekly O Pasquim
O Pasquim
O Pasquim is the name of a Brazilian periodical which was the first and most important to resist against the Brazilian military dictatorship. The idea for the periodical began in 1968 after a meeting of cartoonist Jaguar with journalists Tarso de Castro and Sérgio Cabral .They were looking for an...
and the daily Tribuna da Imprensa. He wrote mostly about international affairs, and manifestly opposed against the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, flouting the official pro-American sympathies of the military government in texts considered so uncharacteristically sober that they later produced a remark from Kucinski that "only then he became a real mentsch". In the wake of the late 1968 "coup inside the coup" — the takeover of the already existing military dictatorship by more radical generals — he was arrested four times, on the slimmest of pretexts.
After deciding to live abroad in order to escape political harassment, Francis moved to the US, a move favoured by his previous upbringing in Columbia, his enduring Trotskyist sympathies (and therefore alienation towards the Stalinist Left of the time), and his actual American connections, such as his acquaintance with diplomat John Mowinckel. He moved in late 1971 to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
as an international correspondent
Foreign correspondent
Foreign Correspondent may refer to:*Foreign correspondent *Foreign Correspondent , an Alfred Hitchcock film*Foreign Correspondent , an Australian current affairs programme...
, on a Ford Foundation
Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....
fellowship
Fellowship
Fellowship may refer to:* An academic position: see fellow* A merit-based scholarship, or form of academic financial aid* Fellowship , a period of medical training after a residency...
. There he assumed a position highly critical of the Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
administration, offering qualified support to the George McGovern
George McGovern
George Stanley McGovern is an historian, author, and former U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party nominee in the 1972 presidential election....
candidacy in the 1972 US presidential election, assuming that McGovern's "naive reformism" offered neverthless a way out of the frozen consensus around Nixon. Late the same year, he published an essay in Portuguese that offered a continuous account of the said elections: Nixon vs. McGovern: as Duas Américas. After 1976, he began working exclusively for the major paper Folha de São Paulo, then under the editorship of the Trotskyist cadre and famed editor Cláudio Abramo
Cláudio Abramo
Cláudio Abramo was a Brazilian journalist and author. Born to Vincenzo Abramo and Iole Scarmagnan , his siblings are Athos Abramo, the Trotskyst actvist Fúlvio Abramo, Beatriz Abramo, the actress Lélia Abramo, Mário Abramo and the engraver Livio Abramo...
.
Francis' fiction-writing and its repercussion
In the late 1970s Paulo Francis published the first two parts of an intended trilogy of social novels in which he intended, in a style reminiscent of James JoyceJames Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, to shun what he saw as the populist
Populism
Populism can be defined as an ideology, political philosophy, or type of discourse. Generally, a common theme compares "the people" against "the elite", and urges social and political system changes. It can also be defined as a rhetorical style employed by members of various political or social...
streak of Brazilian modern fiction i.e., the portrayal of the lives of the rural lower and/or higher classes typical of later Brazilian modernist
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
authors such as Érico Veríssimo
Erico Verissimo
Erico Verissimo was an important Brazilian writer, born in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. His father, Sebastião Veríssimo da Fonseca, heir of a rich family in Cruz Alta, Rio Grande do Sul, met financial ruin during his son's youth...
, Jorge Amado
Jorge Amado
Jorge Leal Amado de Faria was a Brazilian writer of the Modernist school. He was the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, his work having been translated into some 49 languages and popularized in film, notably Dona Flor and her Two Husbands in 1978...
or Graciliano Ramos
Graciliano Ramos
Graciliano Ramos de Oliveira was a Brazilian Post-Modernist writer, politician and journalist. In most of his novels he depicts the precarious situation of the poor inhabitants of the Brazilian sertão.-Life:Graciliano Ramos de Oliveira was born in the city of Quebrangulo, in the Brazilian State...
. He chose instead the description of life among the happy few in 1960s–1970s Rio ("the elite of the charming parochialism of Rio de Janeiro [fashionable boroughs], their parties and sensual pleasures") —a project reminiscent not only of James Joyce, but also of Scott Fitzgerald
Scott Fitzgerald
Scott Fitzgerald may refer to:*F. Scott Fitzgerald , American author*Scott L. Fitzgerald , member of the Wisconsin State Senate*Scott Fitzgerald , former Wimbledon defender, former manager of Brentford...
. By the same token, he associated his embrace of modernist stylish conventions (juxtaposition
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is the placement of two things near each other.Juxtaposition may refer to:...
, non-linear narration) to the necessity of portraying an emerging urban Brazil.
The first novel, Cabeça de Papel (Paperhead, a pun with a Brazilian nursery rhyme), a mix between a memoir and spy thriller, was published in Brazil in 1977. In 1979, he published a sequel, Cabeça de Negro (also a pun, this time with the name of a kind of homemade firework called "black man's head")- which was intended as a thriller and also as one of the various 1970s memorial novels that chronicled the armed underground struggle against the Brazilian military dictatorship. Both novels were moderate sales success and critical failures. Brazilian scholars with both an academic or journalistic background criticised Francis' writing for sloppiness; the literary critic José Guilherme Merquior
José Guilherme Merquior
José Guilherme Merquior was a Brazilian diplomat, academic, writer, literary critic and philosopher.-Biography:...
even said he simply had shunned reading one of Francis' novels to the end for its plain want of literary qualities. Other critics, however, like the writer Silvano Santiago, maintained that Francis' apparent lack of stylish qualities simply meant that he, like many others, simply felt the imprint of the times: in the absence of open public debate, it was unavoidable that literature would assume a parajournalistic function aimed at a transposition of the real. According to the prominent Austro-Brazilian critic Otto Maria Carpeaux
Otto Maria Carpeaux
Otto Maria Carpeaux , born Otto Karpfen, was a Brazilian literary critic born in Austria and multilingual scholar.Carpeaux was born in 1900 in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish family, and lived there until 1939...
, what Francis' novels offered was information "about a fringe of Brazilian society that snorts lines
Cocaine dependence
Cocaine dependence is a psychological desire to regularly use cocaine. It can result in cardiovascular and brain damage such as constricting blood vessels in the brain, causing strokes and constricting arteries in the heart, causing heart attacks specifically in the central nervous system.The use...
and stays drunk" and "an out of focus look at a seaside [i.e. fashionable] swathe of our age". Francis replied to his critics' restrictions in his usually vitriolic fashion by calling them "smarties who adopt the blurbs of foreign books [as their own] in order to make themselves a career [...] the plague of university professors in Brazil is more serious than the Black Death
Black Death
The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350. Of several competing theories, the dominant explanation for the Black Death is the plague theory, which attributes the outbreak to the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Thought to have...
in the Middle Ages"
Francis was also criticized for an alleged lack of depth in his political and cultural commentaries and confusion arising from his attempt at melding the Joycean stream of consciousness with the plot of a spy thriller, or, in the words of a paper critic for Folha de São Paulo, Vinicius Torres Filho, for producing in his novels something like "a watered-down Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
, betraying the ridiculous obsession, [proper to those] who came of age at the beginning of the Cold War, to think of themselves as sophisticated [...] for seeing conspiracies and spies everywhere". The same critics also pointed to the patchy plot of Francis' novels and his shallow digressions - in which the writer showed a weakness for incessant quotes and untimely comment, which, despite their undeniable charm showed an author who simply couldn't refrain from offering his erudition in a showcase to the prospective reader. This alleged self-centered character of his fictions made literary critic João Luiz Lafetá declare that Francis had intended to write about the anatomy of the Brazilian ruling class but had written only about his (dependent) position towards it as an intellectual.
However, what these same critics acknowledged as the greatest achievement of the two novels was Francis's "stylistics of mockery" (retórica da esculhambação): his grammatically incorrect phrasing, polyglot vocabulary and confused mix between the erudite and the downright vulgar. In a pithy description, his was "a messy(avacalhada), aggressive rhetoric, in itself a critique of the pompous logorrhea and mystification [proper to Brazilian ruling elites]". However, despite the author's avowed leftism at the time, the American literary scholar Malcolm Silvermann considered his tone to be already that of a nihilist
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
: in the words this same critic, what every character in Francis' novels displayed - irrespective of political affiliation - was the same "careless erotico-politic debauchery, conspicuous consuming, belligerent use of obscenities and a general disdain for everyone". Such was an outward manifestation of a deeper process that affected Francis as well as other Brazilian Left intellectuals of the time: a general feeling of disenchantment that eventually found a solution in the most extreme aggression directed toward earlier ideals.
After the joint publication, in 1982, of two novellas under the title Filhas do Segundo Sexo ("Children of the Second Sex") - an attempt at tackling the issue of middle-class female emancipation and at the same time at plain language feuilleton
Feuilleton
Feuilleton was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers, consisting chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles...
- which was very ill-received by both critics and public, Francis stopped publishing fiction. Eleven years after his death, a new novel, left by Francis as a draft, was to be published after being edited by his widow: Carne Viva ("Open Wound"), where the author tried, again, to portray the lives of the wealthy and sophisticated in between a mythical 1960s Rio de Janeiro and an equally mythical French May — something that led critic Vinícius Torres Freire, in Folha de São Paulo, to state that Francis had left only a memoir about the kitsch
Kitsch
Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...
character of his usual snobbery.
The later years: ideological shift and media celebrity (1979–1997)
In 1980, Francis published a mostly political memoir upon turning 50, O afeto que se encerra ("The love enclosed" - a pun again, this time on a verse from the Brazilian Flag AnthemBrazilian Flag Anthem
The Brazilian Flag Anthem, or Hino à Bandeira Nacional, is an hymn dedicated to the country's flag.The lyrics were written by poet Olavo Bilac, and the music composed by Francisco Braga...
), in which he confirmed his Marxist beliefs. Shortly afterwards, however, he made a sharp and sudden turn from Trotskyism to conservative views. A gulf developed between him and the Left in the Brazilian intellectual and political scene, during the demise of the military dictatorship and after, with Francis hurling insults from New York at various academics and politicians, and especially at the Workers' Party
Workers' Party (Brazil)
The Workers' Party is a democratic socialist political party in Brazil. Launched in 1980, it is recognized as one of the largest and most important left-wing movements of Latin America. It governs at the federal level in a coalition government with several other parties since January 1, 2003...
, which in the post-dictatorship democracy quickly became the dominant Brazilian leftist party. According to one of his critics, "He chose his targets carefully and used the most sordid adjectives. The choicest targets were mostly the leaders of popular movements, the Left, specially the WP, writers and scholars, whom he smeared by name, without subtlety".
Various reasons were offered for this shift, that was made before the demise of "currently existing socialism": the media scholar Kucinski talks about disenchantment and alienation; some fellow journalists propose plain objective interest, noting that Francis, in the early 1980s, had lobbied covertly in his column for private business interests. Others argue for vanity at hobnobbing with Establishment figures. He was also criticised for having little understanding of the Brazilian realities, commenting on Brazil while living abroad - as well as feigning an acquaintance with the New York intellectual milieu which, according to the same critics, he didn't actually possess.
Other authors, however, such as historian Isabel Lustosa, have a different explanation: as a Left intellectual, Francis had already nurtured a deep-seated cultural elitism
Elitism
Elitism is the belief or attitude that some individuals, who form an elite — a select group of people with intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most...
, as well as a loathing for the emergence of the so-called new social movements
New social movements
The term new social movements is a theory of social movements that attempts to explain the plethora of new movements that have come up in various western societies roughly since the mid-1960s which are claimed to depart significantly from the conventional social movement paradigm.There are two...
, a loathing expressed, for instance, in his lifelong misogyny
Misogyny
Misogyny is the hatred or dislike of women or girls. Philogyny, meaning fondness, love or admiration towards women, is the antonym of misogyny. The term misandry is the term for men that is parallel to misogyny...
. His uncompromising anti-feminism caused him to be snubbed by the American poetess Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...
.For Francis, leftism represented above all a means to an end: the social modernization and political democratization of Brazilian society - which ultimately meant embracing mainstream American values and American culture. In Lustosa's words, Francis' opposition to an autarkic
Autarky
Autarky is the quality of being self-sufficient. Usually the term is applied to political states or their economic policies. Autarky exists whenever an entity can survive or continue its activities without external assistance. Autarky is not necessarily economic. For example, a military autarky...
Brazilian cultural nationalism was such as to eventually decide him to be "rather the last in the Court than the first in the backwater". Even before the 1964 military coup, Francis had decided to support Goulart's government only to the extent that Goulart stoood for a modernizing agenda, in which "the populist politico of yesterday became the historical agent of today".
In later years, Francis came to express a fear that the emergence of a grassroots, mass, trade-union-based and anti-intellectual Left politics such as that which the Workers' Party represented, meant the risk that Brazil and the Brazilians could distance themselves from "our cultural heritage [sic] which is the West, the USA". His increasing disgust with Brazilian society at large, fostered by the failure of the Left to prevent the 1964 military coup as well as his growing sense of alienation from Brazilian politics, also could have had a role at his ideological volteface. Even in the 1960s, commenting on a novel by his friend Carlos Heitor Cony
Carlos Heitor Cony
Carlos Heitor Cony is a journalist and author was born in Rio de Janeiro on March 14, 1926. He is classed as center-left and faced persecution under the military government in the 1960s. He is one of Brazil's leading journalists and novelists with ten of his works being filmed. He is a columnist at...
, Francis had pondered on the incompatibility between the activity of the intellectuals and general Brazilian society. In a way, Francis' political rightward shift was an emotional rejection of the backwardness which he came to identify with all things Brazilian ("the climate abominable, the culture a desert, the food excessive and wretched, the political environment unbearable").) Such an a priori rejection, as it was, needed not be very intellectually developed: in a 1994 interview, Francis offered as a reason for his shift a 1970s trip to the American Midwest, "the industrial center of the country" where he allegedly had seen "nothing to equal it, in the way of progress and workers' welfare".
These and similar views justified opinions such as the one expressed later, in one of Francis' obituaries, by his late political friend and former Minister of Planning of the Castelo Branco
Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco
Marshal Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco was a Brazilian military leader and politician.He was President of Brazil, as a military dictator, after the 1964 coup d'etat...
dictatorial government Roberto Campos: Francis' columns were intellectually worthless, but made nevertheless good propaganda, as they were "a weird bouquet of [...] economic guesswork...[But then] there are many writers but few able to box for ideas". Such views, were, in themselves, very simple, consisting in an extreme and shallow variety of Marxist historicism
Historicism
Historicism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglect the role of...
-cum-Reaganian
Reaganomics
Reaganomics refers to the economic policies promoted by the U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s, also known as supply-side economics and called trickle-down economics, particularly by critics...
supply-side economics
Supply-side economics
Supply-side economics is a school of macroeconomic thought that argues that economic growth can be most effectively created by lowering barriers for people to produce goods and services, such as lowering income tax and capital gains tax rates, and by allowing greater flexibility by reducing...
: in order to liberate the forces of production and develop Brazil, it was, in his view, necessary "to surrender the country to people who want and know how to make money - private capital". An essay published in 1985, O Brasil no Mundo, identifying Brazilian authoritarianism with an absence of Capitalism, expressed this ideological shift. In his last book, Trinta Anos Esta Noite (1994), a memoir published on the 30th anniversary of the 1964 coup, he would argue that a socialist transformnation of Brazilian society at the time was unachievable, and that Brazil should develop into the American sphere of influence.
Such ideas would eventually express themselves in a kind of bigotry
Bigotry
A bigot is a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices, especially one exhibiting intolerance, and animosity toward those of differing beliefs...
with ever more markedly racist overtones, directed against "Mediterranean peoples, blacks, poor folk of all hues, Northeastern Brazilians". This trend began with a 1988 column directed against the then Workers' Party candidate to the São Paulo mayorship Luiza Erundina
Luiza Erundina
- Political history :From 1980 to 1997 she was affiliated with the PT party . In 1997 she changed to the PSB party. Erundina served on the São Paulo city council from 1983-1987. From 1987-1988 she was a state deputy for the state of São Paulo. She was São Paulo's mayor from 1989 to 1992, and is...
, a female from rural Northeastern Brazil whom he described as a "beefy gentleman", a "hottie", and whose prospects of winning the election he described with a Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
quote ("the horror, the horror"). This kind of abuse eventually procured Francis a doubtful fame, built around his various scandalous smears, such as when he expressed his desire to have the WP MP-cum-unionist, the Afro-Brazilian Vicentinho, "whipped as a slave". In another of his pithy statements, he stated that "the discovery [sic] of the clarinet
Clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...
by Mozart was a greater contribution than anything Africa gave us until today". When President Fernando Collor
Fernando Collor de Mello
Fernando Affonso Collor de Mello was the 32nd president of Brazil from 1990 to 1992, when he resigned in a failed attempt to stop his trial of impeachment by the Brazilian Senate...
created a Ya̧nomamö Park in Brazil, he wrote that this was the gesture of someone who gave "land in abundance" to a people who "weren't even of use as slaves". In a 1990s column, he would write - in a statement described as "insensitive" by an American historian - that "Brazilian political problems stemmed from the stranglehold of northeastern elites".
Paulo Francis was attacked by many of his former associates, and the number of disputes in which he became involved heightened his fame as a controversial journalist. Many of these polemics became, in themselves, pop culture events, as was the case of the show of mutual animosity between him and the popular composer Caetano Veloso
Caetano Veloso
Caetano Emanuel Viana Teles Veloso , better known as Caetano Veloso, is a Brazilian composer, singer, guitarist, writer, and political activist. Veloso first became known for his participation in the Brazilian musical movement Tropicalismo which encompassed theatre, poetry and music in the 1960s,...
. From 1979 on, he worked as a TV commentator for Rede Globo
Rede Globo
Rede Globo , or simply Globo, is a Brazilian television network, launched by media mogul Roberto Marinho on April 26, 1965. It is owned by media conglomerate Organizações Globo, being by far the largest of its holdings...
—something that was in itself a telling proof of his political shift, as he had during the dictatorship charged the Globo boss Roberto Marinho
Roberto Marinho
Roberto Pisani Marinho was the president and founder of the biggest Brazilian TV channel, Globo, a television network with 113 stations and associates...
with manipulating information in order to have him banished from Brazil. Also, after a heated dispute with the newspaper ombudsman
Ombudsman
An ombudsman is a person who acts as a trusted intermediary between an organization and some internal or external constituency while representing not only but mostly the broad scope of constituent interests...
of Folha de São Paulo Caio Túlio Costa — mostly over Francis' repeated insulting of the then WP's presidential candidate and future president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva,whom Francis had described as "[an individual] named after an octopus and an [association football] Left winger, a half-illiterate with the discreet charm of the Proletariat". Costa also pointed to Francis' racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
Francis left the Folha during 1991 and began writing his column for the O Estado de São Paulo.
As a television commentator, Francis quickly became a pop culture phenomenon, playing the persona of the pundit always ready to offer a stinging comment in a basso voice—earning him various impersonators on Brazilian TV. This public persona, regarded by some as a caricature of himself, was often criticised as having a less-than-ideal regard for factual truth: according to an anecdote told by one of his friends, when Francis was still working for Folha de São Paulo, one reporter, charged with revising his column, approached the then editor-in-chief of the paper, Boris Casoy
Boris Casoy
Boris Casoy is a Brazilian journalist, the son of Jewish Russian immigrant parents. He has spent most of his professional life in TV journalism and is currently a Brazilian TV news anchorman....
, saying that "Francis' numbers do not check with truth", to which the editor - known for his rightist political stands - replied "Sonny, it's your numbers that must check with reality; Francis' numbers needn't".
Final disputes and death
His style - "a permanent diarrhea of insults, an opera-like performance of a bomber in the service of a single cause- his own" eventually caused lasting grudges. Francis was sued repeatedly in Brazilian courts for libel, to no avail. In early 1996, he was attacked bitterly by the anthropologist and then senator Darcy RibeiroDarcy Ribeiro
Darcy Ribeiro was a Brazilian anthropologist, author and politician. Darcy Ribeiro's ideas of Latin American identity have influenced several later scholars of Latin American studies...
, who, reacting to Francis' disparaging comments on a bill he had presented on the restructuring of Brazil's education system, called him a neogringo
Gringo
Gringo is a slang Spanish and Portuguese word used in Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries in Latin America, to denote foreigners, often from the United States. The term can be applied to someone who is actually a foreigner, or it can denote a strong association or assimilation into...
and charged him with lobbying for private universities' interests: "Francis is no innocent, his news is neither information nor opinion, but a task on behalf of interest groups". Late this year, an entire book was published listing and describing various cases of his supposed plagiarisms and abuses.
The last controversial act in which Paulo Francis was involved was an early 1997 attack, on cable TV, on the management of Brazilian state-owned oil corporation Petrobras
Petrobras
Petróleo Brasileiro or Petrobras is a semi-public Brazilian multinational energy corporation headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is the largest company in Latin America by market capitalization and revenue, and the largest company headquartered in the Southern Hemisphere by market...
as dishonest. Francis also claimed that its directors had US$50 million stashed in a Swiss bank account
Banking in Switzerland
All banks in Switzerland are regulated by Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority , which derives its authority from a series of federal statutes...
. After Francis’ statements, Petrobras’ management sued him for libel before an American court, enabled by the fact that the show was broadcast in the US to Brazilian cable TV subscribers. Soon after, he suffered a fatal heart attack, dying in New York on February 4, 1997. He was buried in Rio de Janeiro, and was survived by his wife, fellow journalist Sonia Nolasco.
According to his personal friend, political columnist Élio Gaspari, Francis had approached then-senator José Serra
José Serra
José Serra is a Brazilian politician, former secretary of state, congressman, senator, minister of Planning and Minister of Health, mayor of São Paulo and Governor of São Paulo state.-Background:...
, who supposedly asked President Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Fernando Henrique Cardoso – also known by his initials FHC – was the 34th President of the Federative Republic of Brazil for two terms from January 1, 1995 to December 31, 2002. He is an accomplished sociologist, professor and politician...
to see that the directors of Petrobras drop the lawsuit against Francis—to no avail, President Cardoso chose to say nothing.
Legacy
Francis left behind a divided legacy, as his Leftist critics and Rightist admirers disagreed on the overall evaluation of his career. For the Left, his was a sad tale of the betrayal of the leftist culture of the 1950s and 1960s Brazilian intelligentsia in which he was nurtured, for the sake of success in the Cultural Industry. In a Berlin-held congress of scholars about Brazilian intellectuals, papers written on him by Kucinski and Lustosa were almost rejected "as his condition as an intellectual was regarded as doubtful". Some said that, even in his leftist phase, Francis always used his supposed erudition as a commodity, for the sake of exerting an authoritarian influence on the cultural debate. Conversely, his late conservative friends and admirers - as well as some of his remaining leftist friends - praised him heartily for his stylistic and satirical qualities, in short: his public persona, downplayed the content of his more controversial statements and praised his clarity in admitting openly the demise of his earlier leftist ideals.Books
- Opinião Pessoal (Cultura e Política) (essays, 1966)
- Certezas da Dúvida (essays, 1970)
- Nixon x McGovern - As Duas Américas (essay, 1972)
- Paulo Francis Nu e Cru (newspaper articles, 1976)
- Cabeça de Papel (novel, 1977)
- Paulo Francis - Uma Coletânea de Seus Melhores Textos Já Publicados (collection of columns, 1978)
- Cabeça de Negro (novel, 1979)
- O Afeto Que Se Encerra (memoir, 1980)
- Filhas do Segundo Sexo (novellas, 1982)
- O Brasil no Mundo (essay, 1985)
- Trinta Anos Esta Noite - 1964: O Que Vi e Vivi (essay, 1994)
- Waaal - O Dicionário da Corte de Paulo Francis (anthology of sayings, 1996)
- Carne Viva (novel, 2008)
Books
- Costa, Cristiane - Pena de Aluguel: Escritores Jornalistas no Brasil, 1904-2004, São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 2005, ISBN 85-359-0663-0
- D'Escoteguy, Ana Carolina,org - Cultura midiática e tecnologias do imaginário: metodologias e pesquisas.Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2005, ISBN 85-7430-505-7
- JaguarJaguar (cartoonist)Sérgio Jaguaribe , known as Jaguar, is a Brazilian cartoonist and comics artist. He was born in Rio de Janeiro.A Banco do Brasil clerk, Jaguar started sketching in a professional basis in 1952, when he offered the weekly magazine Manchete some cartoons loosely based on the work of the...
& Augusto,Sérgio, orgs. O Pasquim- Antologia: Vol.III, 1973-1974. Rio de Janeiro: Desiderata, 2009, ISBN 978-85-99070-54-3 . - Kucinski, Bernardo - "Paulo Francis: uma tragédia brasileira", IN A Síndrome da Antena Parabólica, São Paulo: Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo, 1998, ISBN 85-86469-12-2.
- Lustosa, Isabel - As trapaças da sorte: ensaios de história política e de história cultural. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2004, ISBN 85-7041-405-6 .
- Moura, George - Paulo Francis: o Soldado fanfarrão, Rio de Janeiro, Objetiva, 2nd. edition, 1996, ISBN 85-7302-089-X.
- Nogueira, Paulo Eduardo - Paulo Francis: polemista profissional. São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial, 2010, ISBN 978-85-7060-761-4
Sites
- Beirão, Nirlando - "Paulo Francis, o homem-bomba". Revista Brasileiros, 32, March 2010 http://www.revistabrasileiros.com.br/edicoes/32/textos/899/.Accessed May 7, 2011
- Freire, Vinicius Torres - "Super-homens nos botecos do Leblon", Folha de São Paulo, 2/4/2007, available on line at http://www.observatoriodaimprensa.com.br/artigos.asp?cod=419ASP002.Accessed May 9, 2011.
- Fonseca, Alexandre Torres - "Paulo Francis, do Teatro à Política: 'Perdoa-me por me traíres'", M.Sc. dissertation, History Department, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2001, available for download at www.dominiopublico.gov.br as Adobe Acrobat document, http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/pesquisa/DetalheObraForm.do?select_action=&co_obra=19019. Accessed May 10, 2011
- Memória Globo - Globo.com - Perfis - Paulo Francis, http://memoriaglobo.globo.com/Memoriaglobo/0,27723,GYP0-5271-265393,00.html. Accessed May 7, 2011