The beginning of the World War found Monteiro Lobato established upon a fazenda, far from the thoughts and centres of literature. It was by accident that he discovered his gifts as a writer. The story is told that one day, rendered indignant by the custom of setting fire to the fields for cleansing purposes, and thus endangering the bordering inhabitants, he sent a letter of protest to a large daily in São Paulo. It seems that the letter was too important, too well-written, too plainly indicative of natural literary talent, to be relegated to the corner where readers’ jeremiads usually wail, and that, instead, it was “featured” upon the first page. From that day the die was cast. The episode, in my opinion, is far more important than it appears. For, whatever form in which the man’s later writings are published, they are in a more important degree just what this initial venture was: a protest, a means of civic betterment, a national contribution. Turn this letter and its mood into a short story and you have, say, such a tale-message as O Jardineiro Timotheo, in which even a garden may be transformed into a mute, many-hued plea for the native flora; make politics of it, and you get such a genuinely humorous product as A Modern Torture, from that strange collection called Urupês. Indeed is not the piece Urupês itself a critique and an exposition of the indigenous “cobrizo”?
It was with the collection Urupês that Monteiro Lobato definitely established himself. In three years it has reached a sale that for Brazil is truly phenomenal: twenty thousand copies. It has been extravagantly praised by such divergent figures as the uncrowned laureate Olavo Bilac (who might have had more than a few words to say about legitimate French influence upon Brazilian poetry) and the imposing Ruy Barbosa, who instinctively recognized the fundamentally sociological value of Lobato’s labours. For of pure literature there is little in the young Saint-Paulist. I fear that, together with a similar group in Buenos Aires, he underestimates the esthetic element in art, confusing it, perhaps, with the snobbish, aloof, vapoury spirits who have a habit of infesting all movements with their neurotic lucubrations. Yet such a view may do him injustice. His style, his attitude, his product, are directly conditioned by the ambient in which he works and the problems he has set out to solve. Less unjust, surely, is the criticism that may be made against him when his earnestness degenerates into special pleading, when his intense feeling tapers off into sentimentality and when what was meant to be humour falls away to caricature. From which it may be gathered that Lobato writes—or rather reprints—too much; for plenty of good journalism should be left where it first appeared and not be sent forth between covers. Also, in an appreciable amount of his work, his execution lags behind his intention, owing in no small measure to a lack of self-discipline and an artistically unripe sincerity.
Urupês was soon followed by Idéas de Jéca Tatú, his Jéca Tatú being a fisherman of Parahyba, a “cobrizo,” first introduced in the preceding book and symbolizing the inertia of the native. In the second book, however, the ideas are anything but those of inertia; Lobato has got into the skin of the fisherman and produced a series of admirable essays and critiques. Of similar nature are the chapters embodied in Cidades Mortas. Negrinha is a collection of short stories. In addition to being the author of these books, he is the editor of a splendid magazine, Revista do Brazil, the publisher of volumes by the rising generation of literary redeemers, instructor to his nation in hygiene, and his energies flow over into yet other channels. He is also the writer of several books for children. The best known of these is Narizinho Arrebitado or, as who should say Little Snub-Nose, and with an appropriate blush I confess that the little girl’s adventures among the flowers and creatures of her native land were responsible for the theft of some hours from the study of fatter, less childish, tomes. As one who would renovate the letters of his nation, Lobato naturally has much to say, inside of Brazil and outside, of the former and present figures of the country’s literature. His work in every phase is first of all an act of nationalism.
From the exclusive stylistic standpoint Lobato is terse, vigorous, intense, to the point. The chapters devoted to the creation of a style (in Jéca Tatú) form a valid plea for a genuinely autochthonous art, and it is instructive to see how he treats the question in its relation to architecture. Brazil has native flora, fauna and mythology which its writers are neglecting for the repetition of the hackneyed hosts of Hellas. (Yet Lobato nods betimes and sees the Laocoön in a gnarled tree.) He is an “anti-literary” writer, scorning the finer graces, yet, besides betraying acute consciousness of being a writer, he employs situations that have been overdone time and again, and worse still, in plots that are no more Brazilian than they are Magyar or Senegalese. Thus, in O Bugio Moqueado we encounter a tale of a woman forced daily to eat a dish prepared by her vindictive husband from the slain body of her lover. It is characteristic that the Brazilian author heaps the horror generously, without at all adding to the effect of the theme as it appears in Greek mythology or in the lore of old Provence.
The truth would seem to be that at bottom Lobato is not a teller of stories but a critic of men. His vein is distinctly satiric, ironic; he has the gift of the caricaturist, and that is why so often his tales run either into sentimentality or into the macabrous. When he tells a tale of horror, it is not the uncannily graduated art of a Poe, but rather the thing itself that is horrible. His innate didactic tendency reveals itself not only in his frankly didactic labours, but in his habit of prefixing to his tales a philosophical, commentative prelude. Because he is a well-read, cosmopolitan person, his tales and comments often possess that worldly significance which no amount of regional outlook can wholly obscure; but because he is so intent upon sounding the national note he spoils much of his writing by stepping onto the pages in his own person.
At his best he suggests the arrival in Brazilian literature of a fresh, spontaneous, creative power. Tales like A Modern Torture (in which a rural dabbler in politics, weary of his postal delivery “job,” turns traitor to the old party and helps elect the new, only to be “rewarded” with the same old “job”) are rare in any tongue and would not be out of place in a collection by Chekhov or Twain. Here is humour served by—and not in the service of—nation, nature and man. Similarly Choo-Pan! with its humorous opening and gradual progress to the grim close, shows what can be done when a writer becomes the master and not the slave of indigenous legend. A comparison of this tale with a similar one, The Tree That Kills, may bring out the author’s weakness and his strength. In the first, under peculiar circumstances, a man meets his death through a tree that, according to native belief, avenges the hewing down of its fellow. In the second, the Tree That Kills is explained as a sort of preface, then follows a tale of human beings in which a foster-child, like the Tree That Kills, eats his way into the love of a childless pair, only first to betray the husband and then, after wearying of the woman, to attempt her life as well. The first story, besides being well told, is made to appear intimately Brazilian; the death of the man, who is a sot and has so bungled his work that the structure was bound to topple over, is natural, and actual belief in the legend is unnecessary; it colours the tale and lends atmosphere. The Tree That Kills, on the other hand, is merely another tale of the domestic triangle, no more Brazilian than anything else, with a twist of retribution at the end that must have appealed to the preacher hidden in Lobato; the analogy of the foster-son to the tree is not an integral part of the tale; the story, in fact, is added to the explanation of the tree parasite and is itself parasitical.
Lobato’s attitude toward education may be gleaned from his child’s book Little Snub-Nose and the epigraph from Anatole France. He wishes to cultivate the imagination rather than cram the intellect. And even in this second reader for public schools—refreshingly free of the “I-see-a-cat” method—one can catch now and then his intention of instructing and satirizing the elder population.
To this caustic spirit, the real Brazil—the Brazil that must set to work stamping its impress upon the arts of the near future—lies in the interior of the country. There he finds the genuine Brazilian, uncontaminated by the “esperanto of ideas and customs” characteristic of the centres that receive immigration from all over the world. There he discovers the raw material for the real national art, as distinguished from cities with their phantasmagoria of foreign importations. And for that art of the interior he has found the great precursor in Euclydes da Cunha—a truly remarkable writer upon whom the wandering Scot, Richard Cunninghame-Graham, drew abundantly, as we have seen, in his rare work upon that Brazilian mystic and fanatic, Antonio Conselheiro. “It was Euclydes da Cunha,” writes Lobato in his Idéas de Jéca Tatú, “who opened for us, in his Sertões, the gates to the interior of the country. The Frenchified Brazilian of the coast cities was astonished. Could there, then, be so many strong, heroic, unpublished, formidable things back there?… He revealed us to ourselves. We saw that Brazil isn’t São Paulo, with its Italian contingent, nor Rio, with its Portuguese. Art beheld new perspectives opened to it.”