By MARCOS FALCHERO FALLEIROS*
Author's preface to the recently published book
Graciliano Ramos made his literary debut at the age of eleven, with the short story “Pequeno pedinte”, published in the school newspaper in Viçosa, The Deluge, which he and his cousin had created under the guidance of geography teacher Mário Venâncio, an exotic figure who appeared in the city as the new postmaster, writer and, in 1906, suicide. It was this kind prophet who, about a year before taking carbolic acid, told the boy Graciliano that he would be a writer – and left him stunned by the news, walking the streets, blind and deaf, stumbling.
Graciliano Ramos confesses that his debut story and the other publications he presented in the newspaper were completely redone by the master, which embarrassed him greatly, since it was clear that everyone would see through the deception. But if we allow for the author's keen critical sense, we can understand that the embarrassments and interpolations in the text, practiced by Mário Venâncio, spoiled rather than improved the half-page story: in it we see the narrative voice, moved by compassion and united with the helpless condition of a child in the hands of hypocritical charity – a level of perception and sensitivity that was the embryo of the many manifestations of the adult that culminated in Dried lives.
There are antecedents, however, even for the boy's early manifestation: his literacy was tortured by spankings, shouting, his father's impatience, and the general rudeness of precarious schools, which the little boy anxiously overcame in order to be able to decipher the stories that fascinated him.
Thus, there is a close link in his life between literacy and literature, so much so that, “almost illiterate” at the age of nine, as he says in Childhood, at eleven he was a small journalist writer and from the age of fourteen he published in magazines such as the mallet, in Rio, and in newspapers and magazines in Maceió, sonnets and other poetic forms with very well-crafted images, revealing mastery of erudite vocabulary and versification rules, in addition to impeccable syntactic maneuvers. It was the result of someone who had given up infamous schools to dedicate himself very competently to self-education.
The “Graciliano Ramos” event can, therefore, fill humanity with enthusiasm, when we see the possibility of the emergence of an extremely refined intellectual coming from a rough and brutal environment, just as a 21st century idiot, fed by the internet, can be astonished by the sophisticated backlands environment that Graciliano Ramos and his friends created in the wilds, between Viçosa and Palmeira dos Índios, provided with newspapers and works brought from far away by cart.
The letters from her youth are as intellectual and fascinating as the best correspondence of great writers around the world – full of jokes, humble and without pedantry. After a frustrating year in Rio de Janeiro, in the second half of 1915, at the age of twenty-two, she returned to her family in Palmeira dos Índios, got married, took over her father's fabric and variety store, naming it “Loja Sincera”, had four children, and was widowed.
In 1921 he participated for three months in the newspaper The Indian, which Father Macedo had inaugurated at the beginning of the year – also in this case with historical literary productions. And, after seven years of widowhood, at the beginning of 1928, he became mayor of the city and married again. The two mayoral reports for the annual presentation of accounts to the state government, written in 1929 and 1930, entered literature, such was the unexpected quality of these texts which, as is usually the case, should be vulgar, demagogic, bureaucratic and boring.
On the contrary, the texts of both reports are direct, with a humor that adds satire to the trickery that surrounds it with the precision of productive and dynamic honesty. Northrop Frye shows the difficulty of defining what literature is due to the two directions of language: the internal direction, towards literature, and the external direction, towards the reference of things. The critic observes that external texts sometimes survive because of their style after their functionality for the representation of facts has been lost.
In Brazil we have examples of Vieira's sermons and, with Euclides da Cunha, the hinterlands, undeniably installed in literature as a non-novel. We can also consider the reports of Mayor Graciliano as such. They were successful.
The poet Augusto Frederico Schmidt, who had a publishing house in Rio, read the reports and guessed that the mayor must have some novel ready. In fact, between 1924 and 1925, Graciliano Ramos, a widower and dejected, had resumed the elaboration or begun writing three short stories: “A carta” – which would serve as the starting point for St. Bernard, even if the initial text is discarded; “Between bars” – would be unfolded into Anguish; the third story stretched out and turned Caetes. This was the novel that, in 1930, Graciliano Ramos had to present to Augusto Frederico Schmidt, in response to the contact that the fortune-telling editor had established with the unknown mayor.
Thanks to the delay in publication, Graciliano Ramos was able to undo the deal, with relief. His entire life he expressed aversion to this “crap”, to use his terms when referring especially to Caetes. Although he insisted on this behavior, Graciliano Ramos never showed signs of false modesty. Well thought out, his observations reveal a qualified critical spirit, which clearly identifies the problems in his books.
As Antonio Candido said, Caetes it is an “early” book, born late: it smells of 19th century Eça de Queiroz, being a mix: you can see in it the copy of the copy that the Portuguese made of Madame Bovary, belonging to the family of adultery novels, and, with a very significant characteristic of its own, it is fundamentally based on To the illustrious house of Ramires. However, it is modernly clear, put in direct and raw language.
Antonio Candido considers that the work has an air of training, as if it were an exercise for the writer to prepare himself for the great work that he would produce next. However, Caetes it is a novel full of attractions and disturbing aspects of novelty in the midst of its old age – if we borrow from Manuel Bandeira what he said about the inaugural poems of Mário de Andrade, we can say that Caetes is of a “bad weird”.
Before sending the book to Augusto Frederico Schmidt, Graciliano Ramos resigned from his position as mayor in the early 1930s, sold the Loja Sincera and moved with his wife and children to Maceió, invited by the governor to take on the role of Director of the Official Press. There, he reworked the text of the novel extensively in the midst of the 1930 Revolution. Thus, the ups and downs of the history of conservative modernization in Brazil left his 1925 work even further behind.
At the end of 1931, he resigned from the position in which he had been kept despite Getúlio Vargas's lieutenants, but which he could not bear. He returned to Palmeira dos Índios and, at the end of 1932, S. Bernardo was already ready, at the same time he asked the Rio editor to cancel the publication and return the copy of Caetes.
However, Jorge Amado had read the originals in Augusto Frederico Schmidt's bookstore and, as a young author excited by the appearance of a new colleague, went to Maceió in 1933 to meet him. With the help of Graciliano's wife, Heloísa, he kidnapped the Caetes back to Schmidt. The intellectual environment of Maceió was at the time a concentration of talents, not only locals, but also those who had arrived: for example, José Lins do Rego and Rachel de Queiroz.
It is a mistake to consider that the striking characteristics of Graciliano Ramos' work were being revealed throughout his production in the following years. The reviews that appeared immediately after the publication of Caetes, at the end of 1933, already showed the great author, to whom the coincidences of history offered a wonderful nest of welcome in Maceió. Jorge Amado highlighted his geometric style. Aurélio Buarque de Holanda said that his friend wrote with the economy of someone sending a telegram.
Graciliano Ramos was invited in early 1933 to be Director of Public Education in Alagoas. Thus, while he was beginning to write Anguish, at the same time he was carrying out a small educational revolution in the state – which certainly influenced his arrest in 1936, when he was taken to the prisons of Rio de Janeiro, during the great hunt that Getúlio Vargas' fascism launched, filling the country's prisons with all types of thinking heads and critical thought, after the failure of the communist revolutionary attempt of 1935.
But the clear and cruel exposition of what private property is in S. Bernardo, published at the end of 1934, must also have entered into the sick considerations of the executioners when drawing up their list of those who deserved jail. S. Bernardo, therefore, is the discovery, the beginning and the starting point of his great work, ultimately equated by a refined and independent Marxism, truly materialist and dialectical – a way out that did not allow him the stagnant world of Caetes.
In Rio de Janeiro, in the middle of ten months and ten days of imprisonment, it was published Anguish, in August 1936. After leaving prison, while Heloísa returned to Maceió to organize the move, Graciliano Ramos went to a boarding house, where he stayed writing Dried lives parallel to the production of articles to earn a few pennies. With the arrival of his wife and two younger daughters, they all stayed in the little room, where they listened to their father's reading and followed the fate of the migrants.
He wrote the chapters and, to survive, published them in the newspapers as short stories, so much so that his boarding house colleague, Rubem Braga, called Dried lives, finally published in 1938, as a “dismantled novel”, without realizing its organic nature – because in addition to the entire chapters, to sell them separately as short stories, Graciliano Ramos wrote them chronologically out of final order, while mentally organizing their future distribution, which cannot be dismantled, even though we can read the chapters with coherent meanings, each one by itself.
With this he concluded his main work of fiction. His brutalist modernism assimilates into the graphic economy of the text the cracked ground of the drought, which retracts into black furrows, to speak clearly against the “obsolete and antidemocratic mist, to be dissipated, fraudulent at bottom” – as Roberto Schwarz put it when discussing the poetry of Oswald de Andrade. Álvaro Lins said that Graciliano Ramos’ style has something hieratic about it.
This is because, together with the aforementioned graphic design, there is the aspect of the biblical desert in its textuality, which so impressed the boy when he heard stories about it. Old Testament, associating them with the Pernambuco backlands where Buíque lived in his early childhood. But in his godless desert, the will to order as the will to justice is equated in this prodigious mind through an imagination limited to what was experienced with his feet on the ground, under the geometric rationality of his constructivism.
This is a style of altarpieces, of paintings that seem to be linked to the dry and rough cut of the northeastern woodcuts of the cordéis – which explains the via crucis of the “dismountable novel” of Dried lives, the “organized chaos” that Antonio Candido saw in Anguish, and Leon Hirzsman's confession that he found, while filming S. Bernardo, the script ready in the book – and thus, by extending the characterization of the altarpiece to the photogram style, the great cinematographic vocation of Graciliano Ramos' work is confirmed, which made Alfredo Bosi see in S. Bernardo a “series of sharp shots”.
If the essence of his work, which until now had been fiction, already bore inescapable marks of the author's biography, he then moved, as Antonio Candido says, from the need to invent to the need to testify. His literature would immediately unfold into memoirism, forming a fluid whole in which fiction and confession merge in the grooves of realistic truth.
Before being arrested, while writing Anguish with so many aspects of his life, the idea came to him to deal directly with it and several chapter titles that would be in the future book, Infancy, were written down. Later, in Rio, after leaving prison, he began to write them from 1938 until 1945, when the book was published. As the reviews already commented at the time, it is not a picturesque memoir, but a case study under lengthy prospection – that is, what we have in truth is the genesis of his work.
Going to the other end of the biography, from 1946 onwards, Graciliano finally managed to write routinely – until the end of his life – prison memories, his projected denunciation of the prison in 1936 – not only testimony, but another prospection, as in Infancy, now expanded by so many underlying questions that make what is solidly observed tremble. Being one of the most important documents in the history of Brazil, it was written with humanist independence and without political ties by this militant of the Communist Party from 1945 onwards.
Even the complete set of his production since the age of eleven, despite all the vicissitudes that could make the work dispersive, maintains an organicity that goes from poetry to chronicles, from literary criticism to manifestos, from short stories to attempts (abandoned, it is true) at theater, from children's literature to folklore, and ends with the lingering hope of travel, the narrative of his visit to the USSR and the communist world of the 1950s. But, from this broad set, the main work stands out, the essence of the “Graciliano Ramos” event: St. Bernard, Anguish, Dry Lives, Childhood e prison memories.
We can then see the mapping of what rises substantially above the whole. Without schematic planning, without proselytizing intentions, averse to forcing political theorizations, Graciliano's Marxist conceptualization provided one of the most important responses to the aporias of engaged art. The five works reveal the constructivist organicity achieved by the author, more by logical consequence than by programmatic premeditation.
This systematic mind, with its distracted genius, followed the path of the three classes in fiction, in a descending manner: it began by revealing the “construction of the bourgeoisie”, as Carlos Nelson Coutinho called it. St. Bernard, that Graciliano Ramos adapted to the rural focus in the face of his non-industrialized context; in the urban world of Maceió, he addressed the lack of a way out of the “screw”, as the author himself describes Luís da Silva’s condition as a petty bourgeois – or the “annexed” class, defined by him in a letter to his son; he then ends the fictional cycle, with proletarianization on the way, in Dry lives, pointing out at the end of the narrative the path to the industrialized South as a bomb-swell, a prophecy proven in the following decades by the workers' movements of a people who had matured their level of consciousness. Thus, the authorship's landmarks remained: the genesis of the work, in Childhood, and its consequence in history, with prison memories.
* Marcos Falchero Falleiros is a retired professor from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte.
Reference
Marcos Falchero Falleiros. Timeline of Graciliano Ramos. Natal, Editora do Autor, 2024, 1222 pages.
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