Paulo Francis (Rio de Janeiro, September 2, 1930 – New York City, February 4, 1997), was a Brazilian 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.
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Born Franz Paul Trannin da Matta Heilborn into a middle-class family of German descent,[1] 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,[2] 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".[3]
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;[4] 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".[5]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".[6]
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.[7]
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.[8] 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.[9] 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".[10] 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".[11]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".[12]
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."[13][14][15] According to Kucinski, his "absence of careful research, established facts, precise information [...] became eventually - through excessive generalization and lack of patience [...] - downright bigotry".[16]
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.[17] 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, [18] 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).[19] 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".[20]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.[21]
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.[22] 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.[23]
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,[24] a mostly literary magazine praised for the quality of its contributors as well as for its innovative graphic design[25] created by Bea Feitler.[26] There he published stories by at the time little-known writers such as Clarice Lispector[27] and Guimarães Rosa.[28]
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.[29] 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.[30] 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.[31]
At the time professing to have joined one of the paramilitary "groups of eleven" being organized by maverick leftist leader Leonel Brizola,[32] 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.[33]
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)[34] 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".[35] 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.[36]
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[37] (and therefore alienation towards the Stalinist Left of the time), and his actual American connections, such as his acquaintance with diplomat John Mowinckel.[38] He moved in late 1971 to New York City as an international correspondent, on a Ford Foundation fellowship.[39] 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.[40] 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.
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 Joyce, to shun what he saw as the populist streak of Brazilian modern fiction[41] 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.[42] 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. [43]
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.[44] 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.[45] 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.[46] 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".[47] 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"[48]
Francis was also criticized for an alleged lack of depth in his political and cultural commentaries[49] 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".[50] 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[51] showed an author who simply couldn't refrain from offering his erudition in a showcase to the prospective reader.[52] 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.[53]
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[54] 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]".[50]In a late critique, the scholar João Manuel dos Santos Cunha would say that it was Francis' own logorrhea in these novals which functioned as a "rape" of journalistic language that made clear his forswearing of any pretense at objectivity in order to allow him to build "a dirty language for a dirty time".[55]
Despite the Francis' 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".[56] 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.[57]
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[58] 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"),[59] 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.[60]
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 Anthem), in which he confirmed his Marxist beliefs.[61] 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".[62]
Various reasons were offered for this shift, that was made before the demise of "currently existing socialism": the media scholar Kucinski talks about disenchantment[63] and alienation;[64] some fellow journalists propose plain objective interest, noting that Francis, in the early 1980s, had lobbied covertly in his column for private business interests.[65] Others argue for vanity at hobnobbing with Establishment figures.[66] He was also criticised for having little understanding of the Brazilian realities, commenting on Brazil while living abroad[67] - as well as feigning an acquaintance with the New York intellectual milieu which, according to the same critics, he didn't actually possess.[68]
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.[69] His uncompromising anti-feminism caused him to be snubbed by the American poetess Adrienne Rich.[70]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.[71] 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".[72] 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".[73]
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".[74] 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,[75] 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.[76] 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").[77]) 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".[78]
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".[79] 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".[80] An essay published in 1985, O Brasil no Mundo, identifying Brazilian authoritarianism with an absence of Capitalism, expressed this ideological shift.[81] 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.[82]
Such ideas would eventually express themselves in a kind of bigotry with ever more markedly[83] racist overtones, directed against "Mediterranean peoples, blacks, poor folk of all hues, Northeastern Brazilians".[84] 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",[85] and whose prospects of winning the election he described with a Joseph Conrad quote ("the horror, the horror").[86] 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".[87] 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".[88] 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".[89] 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".[90]
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.[91] 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.[92] 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[93] and an [association football] Left winger, a half-illiterate with the discreet charm of the Proletariat".[94] Costa also pointed to Francis' racism[95] 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.[96] This public persona, regarded by some as a caricature of himself,[97] 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".[98]
His style - "a permanent diarrhea of insults, an opera-like performance of a bomber in the service of a single cause- his own"[99] eventually caused lasting grudges. Francis was sued repeatedly in Brazilian courts for libel, to no avail.[100] In early 1996, he was attacked bitterly by the anthropologist and then senator Darcy Ribeiro, 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".[101] Late this year, an entire book was published listing and describing various cases of his supposed plagiarisms and abuses.[102]
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.[100] 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.[103]
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,[104] for the sake of success in the Cultural Industry.[105] 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".[106] 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.[107] 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.[108]