Why Choose Brazil as the Subject of an Epic Novel?

BRAZIL -- The Making of a Novel - Part 2

 

Why choose Brazil as my subject? And why on such an immense scale? I've always believed one should make no small dreams for the results will be commensurate. During our time together, James Michener and I spoke about places that would lend themselves to treatment in epic novels. He mentioned Alaska and the Caribbean, both of which would become locales for Michener books. I suggested Brazil.

 

The more I began to think of Brazil, the more reasons I found for wanting to write about the country. My very ignorance prompted question after question, and when I began to look for answers, I quickly sensed a tremendous story that hadn't been told to the North American public. As an outsider to both nations, I had a singular vantage point unbridled with innate prejudices and chauvinism.

 

Among other compelling reasons for choosing Brazil, not the least was my having just spent two years delving exhaustively into the history of my birthplace. Broadly-speaking, the relations between the races in South Africa and Brazil couldn't have been more different in the 1980s: how, when, why, I wanted to know, did the two nations take such radically different paths? This wasn't something to include in the book I envisaged about Brazil but it gave me a base-line to work from in considering the dynamics of Brazilian society. In Africa, I also traveled widely in Mozambique and Angola, gaining insights into the Portuguese, their history and way of life, a valuable introduction to the colonizers of Brazil.

 

On January 5, 1981, the first working day of the year, I woke up at the usual time when I would leave for the Digest's offices in Chappaqua. This day there was no Digest, only the vast unknown in Brazil and with my future.

 

During the next three months I haunted libraries and second-hand bookstores in New York. I wasn't selective but read anything I came across related to Portugal and Brazil, anything but fiction. In plotting so vast a story one has to take care not to lock into the imagination of others and inadvertently borrowing from their works, a pitfall Michener drew my attention to when we were working on The Covenant.

 

I read hundreds of books and articles on my library forays, not only on my initial three-month plunge

into Brazil but as I went along. A small sampling of my reading list includes some of the classic works on Brazil and Portugal, both contemporary and historic:

 

 

 

                   

The Mansions and the Shanties, Gilberto Freyre  

The Masters and the Slaves, Gilberto Freyre

Order and Progress, Gilberto Freyre  

New World in the Tropics, Gilberto Freyre

Bandeirantes and Pioneers, Vianna Moog

History of Portugal, Antonio H. de Oliveira Marques

Portuguese Seaborne Empire, Charles R. Boxer

Portugal and Brazil, Harold Livermore and W.J. Entwhistle

Colonial Background of Modern Brazil, Caio Prado, Jr.

The Brazilians, José Honorio Rodrigues

Latin America, Preston E. James

History of Brazil, Andrew Grant, 1809

History of Brazil, E. Bradford Burns

From Barter to Slavery, Portuguese and Indians, 1500-1800, A. Marchant

Captains of Brazil, Elaine Sanceau

True History of His Captivity, Hans Staden

Discovery of the Amazon, according to account of Fr. Gaspar de Carvajal

The Histories of Brazil, Pero de Magalhaes, trs. John B. Stetson

Hakluyt, the Principal Navigations, Volume XI

A Treatise of Brazil, Padre Fernão de Cardim in Purchas, his Pilgrims XVI

Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654, Charles R. Boxer

Golden Age of Brazil, 1695-1750 , Charles R. Boxer

Salvador de Sa and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, Charles R. Boxer

Brazil, Portrait of Half a Continent, T. Lynn Smith

Apostle of Brazil: Padre João Anchieta, Helen G. Dominian

Jews in Colonial Brazil, Arnold Wiznitzer

The Negro in Brazil, Arthur Ramos trs. Richard Pattee

Neither Slave nor Free, David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene

African Religions of Brazil, Roger Bastide

Brazilian Culture, Fernando de Azevedo, trs. William R. Crawford

Evolution of Brazil, Manoel de Oliveira Lima

Rebellion in the Backlands, Euclides da Cunha

 

One of my early sources was the three volume History of Brazil written by the English romantic poet, Robert Southey, between 1810 and 1819, considered the first comprehensive history of colonial Brazil. I pored over Southey's thousand-plus pages in awe of his achievement, the closest he ever came to Brazil was among the volumes in the library of his uncle, Reverend Herbert Hill, chaplain to the English Factory at Lisbon. I would have the opportunity to visit Brazil and carried Southey with in my thoughts, an inspiration to another outsider making a literary journey of epic proportions. Southey showed that it could be done.

 

 



 

Daydreaming about Anacondas, Headhunters and El Dorado

When I began work on my novel I knew as little about Brazil as the next foreigner. I'd once stopped over at Rio de Janeiro for three days on a flight to Africa, an instant course in cliches of Carnival, samba, beach and jungle. I'd another impression that harked back to my South African childhood, when the country was still tied to England.

 

Every month there arrived from London an adventure magazine for boys, its pages filled with the glories of Empire and conquests of its heroes. Among them, explorer Percy Fawcett who was most often depicted in a tiny canoe paddling past the gaping jaws of an anaconda. Colonel Fawcett went in search of a fabulous Lost City in Brazil and vanished forever in Mato Grosso. The intrepid fortune hunter lived on in the imagination of boys 1ike myself who scoffed at the idea that an Englishman had been killed by headhunters and pictured our champion sitting on a golden throne in E1 Dorado.

 

Living in a day when we still saw the world divided into two parts — those who belonged to the British Commonwealth and those who didn't — I naturally considered Fawcett to be the discoverer of the Brazilian interior. Before his time, I believed, no one dared venture there except the denizens of the impenetrable forest.

 

I remember drawing a huge map of Brazil, days of painstaking work with pen and India ink, with every known river and a myriad tributaries. I marked my hero's route to "Point X" where he disappeared. The map won me a coveted star from my geography teacher, Miss Kane, and a vow to "find" Fawcett. Little did I know that many years later I would visit some of the very places explored by Fawcett that remained as deserted as when he first set eyes on them half a century earlier.

 

As happens with boyhood fantasies, somewhere along the way I left Fawcett behind and got on with my schooling. Then came the real world and a brief and wretched experience as a law clerk. My father knew I wanted to be a journalist but warned that before I wasted my life as a writer, I should get a safe "billet," a favorite word of his. He suggested a career in accountancy or better still, a job with the Johannesburg city council, where I would be guaranteed a pension. (A chilling prospect for a seventeen-year-old!) I tried law but after a couple of years of hounding debtors and licking stamps, I abandoned this course.
 

Then came another round of fantasies with a disastrous attempt to go into business for myself. I founded the Lincoln Swift Organization, an odd mixture of cane furniture factory, pottery distributor, and missing persons bureau. It survived three months. At last, in an act of desperation, I literally threw myself at the feet of the manager of the Johannesburg Star and asked for a job. I got it.

Between daydreams about Fawcett, I'd been writing stories from the age of ten. I was seventeen when I penned my first novel, a three-hundred page saga of teenage angst in a small town in South Africa. Unpublished, I included it with my application to the Star and to my everlasting gratitude, the editors decided to take a chance on me. Three weeks after joining the paper, my name was in print for the first time beneath an article on the editorial page: Happiness is an Unprejudiced Mind.

 

My career as reporter, features writer and editor spanned seventeen   years on three continents. From the Star I went to Post, a newspaper serving the black and mixed-race communities of South Africa. Then to England and the South-East London Mercury, a London weekly; in London I joined Reader's Digest returning to South Africa, where I became editor-in-chief. In 1977, I came to the magazine's headquarters at Pleasantville in the United States. My transfer couldn't have been more propitious.

 

In 1978 because of my background and the Digest's long-standing relationship with James A. Michener, I was assigned to work with the writer on his South African novel, The Covenant. My two years with Michener convinced me that were I ever to be an author I would have to make a total commitment to writing, not pecking away at manuscripts in the dark of night but out in the open. At the end of 1980, I resigned from the Digest to begin work on Brazil.

 

BRAZIL - The Making of A Novel - Part 1