Foreword to the Brazilian Edition

JEFFERSON CANO, Department of Literature, University of Campinas (Unicamp)

WHEN FRANCISCO DE Paula Brito died, the young journalist Machado de Assis devoted his Comments of the Week column in the Diário do Rio de Janeiro to his friend:

Yet another! This year must be counted as an illustrious obituary, where everyone, friend and citizen, can see inscribed more than one name dear to the heart or soul.

Long is the list of those who, in the space of these twelve months, which are about to expire, have fallen into the tremendous embrace of that wanton who, as the poet said, does not discriminate her lovers.

Now it is a man who, due to his social and political virtues, his intelligence and his love of work, had achieved widespread esteem.

He began as a printer and died a printer. In that modest role, he enjoyed the friendship of everyone around him.

Paula Brito set a rare and good example. He had faith in his political convictions, sincerely believing in the results of their application; tolerant, he was not unjust with his adversaries; sincere, he never compromised with them.

He was also a friend, above all a friend. He loved young people because he knew that they are the hope of his homeland, and because he loved them, he extended them his protection as much as he could.

Instead of dying [and] leaving a fortune, which he could have done, he died as poor as he was in life, thanks to the extensive employment he gave to his income and the generosity that led him to share what he earned from his labor.

In these times of selfishness and calculation, we should mourn the loss of men who, like Paula Brito, stand out from the common mass of men.1

Half a century later, another statement, this time from the memoirs of Salvador de Mendonça, would become an almost obligatory reference about the role of Paula Brito in mid-nineteenth century Rio de Janeiro:

In Largo do Rocio [also known as Praça da Constituição], outside Paula Brito’s establishment, across the street, there were two benches where, on Saturday afternoons, the following individuals would get together regularly to converse about literature: Machado de Assis, then a clerk at Paula Brito’s bookstore and press; Manuel Antônio de Almeida, a writer for the Correio mercantil and author of Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant; Henrique César Muzzio, a physician without a clinic and highly esteemed theater critic; Casimiro de Abreu, poet and clerk in a retail establishment; José Antonio, treasury employee and author of the humorous Lembranças [Memories] and, finally, this writer, then a preparatory school student. Many times, as he walked from Paula Brito’s shop to his own home across the square, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, the creator of the Brazilian novel, would come and sit with us, honest and sincere, and more than once he was accompanied by Gonçalves Dias, with his lean body, melancholy aspect, and genial gaze, and Araújo Porto-Alegre, with his bear-like physique and the perennial youthfulness of a healthy soul and body.²

Those who compare these two quotations today can easily see how time has imposed on Paula Brito’s memory a different meaning from that which was still present in Machado de Assis’s affectionate recollection of him. The publisher’s political virtues seemed to have been permanently erased, along with his image as the protector of youth. Indeed, Paula Brito’s importance during that period seemed no longer to be found in himself but in those with whom he interacted—the most outstanding figures on the literary scene of his time and the future. His was almost a name that hitched a ride in the footnotes of literary history, solely because he kept good company.

Nothing could be more unfair. The book the reader is now perusing reveals a man with a career so rich that historians rarely have the good fortune to find his like; a man who, if he were a fictional character, would be what Lukács called a type, in which “all contradictions—the most important social, ethical, and psychological contradictions of a time—are linked in a single living unit.”3 But Paula Brito was not a fictional character, and Rodrigo Camargo de Godoi is no Balzac—despite a reference here and there. He is a historian who is well up to the task imposed by his subject.

“All contradictions” seems like an overstatement, but it is not. The decades between 1830 and 1860 were rife with contradictions, and it is hard to think of any that did not have a deep impact on Paula Brito’s life. The intersection of racial and political identities when both were formed through the press would find in a printer descended from slaves a focal point around which the most significant tensions of his time emerged. The intersection of the individual with his enterprising ambitions and dreams and the flow of capital that was seeking new outlets after the definitive end of the transatlantic slave trade would give the publisher opportunities to rise and fall, test the limits of protection, and experience the vicissitudes of speculation.

All of this is skillfully handled by Rodrigo Camargo de Godoi, who shows the reader how these tensions ran through Paula Brito’s life and (reprising the “hook” of Lukács’s definition) are joined together in a living unit. I hope the reader will forgive this repetition, but there is good reason for it. After all, the idea that the life of the subject, represented in writing, could constitute a unit in which the very (contradictory) unity of the historic process is reflected is common both to the interpretation undertaken by a literary critic and the process of writing undertaken by a historian who devotes himself to a biography. Going beyond writing, does such unity exist? Once again, this is a highly sensitive question for practitioners of both disciplines, and neither will find an easy answer—much less a safe one. For many, of course, it is pointless to pose it, but if we accept the question, this book becomes even more interesting—not by answering it, of course, but by permitting us to think about it every step of the way.