Paulo Francis

Paulo Francis (Rio de Janeiro, September 2, 1930 – New York, February 4, 1997), was a Brazilian journalist, political pundit, novelist and critic.

A controversial personality, Francis became a highlight of modern Brazilian journalism through his multifarious intellectual references and the colloquial qualities of his writing, as well as for his ready wit and sarcasm, which tended however—especially in his late career—to degenerate into "cruelty, compulsive smearing and abuse".

Early life and career (1930–1964)

Born Franz Paul Trannin da Matta Heilborn into a middle-class family of German stock, centered around his coffee-dealer paternal grandfather, Francis received his early education in various traditional Catholic schools of Rio de Janeiro, afterward attending classes at the National School of Philosophy (at the time a general humanities course) of the University of Brazil in the 1950s. During college, he became interested in amateur theatricals, being admitted into the student troupe kept by the prominent critic Paschoal Carlos Magno, with whom he made a tour through Northeastern Brazil, during which he was avowedly shocked and disgusted by the surrounding "malnourishment, poverty, backwardness, the unawareness of welfare and civil society".

Developing ambitions of following a career in the stage after that travel, Francis tried his hand as an actor in Rio de Janeiro during he early 1950s, but, although he received an award as a rising star in 1952, he failed to show talent enough to go on. Deciding instead on a staging career, he 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—or perhaps was simply unable to receive a graduate degree because he had already dropped out from his undergraduate studies in Rio, a subject about which he was always less than candid—showing a trait that was to plague him to the end: the inability to perform sustained intellectual work, and a tendency to bank instead on his flashes of wit and borrowed erudition (the use of incessant quotes and bon mots), something that made him prone to "mistakes,imprecision, garbled recollections" - a trait of what was to become his personal "method": "the absence of careful research, established facts, precise information [...] becoming eventually - through excessive generalization and lack of patience [...] - downright bigotry".

Nevertheless, his acquaintance with contemporary American criticism made him ready for the important role he was to play in Brazilian theater, which was at the time in a feverish process of cultural modernization in the wake of the fall of the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship—a process that was to go on until the 1964 military coup. In 1957, Paulo Francis started to write as a theater critic in the newspaper Diário Carioca. He soon earned kudos for his defence of a modern approach to staging, instead of the provincial bickering between rival troupes that had hitherto been staple at the Brazilian stage (alongside various other critics, such as the theater scholar Sabato Magaldi and the Shakespeare tanslator and expert Barbara Heliodora). In his own words, what he proposed was "to strive, on the stage, to find an equivalent for the feeling of unity and total expression one finds while reading a text". However, he couldn't refrain from a compulsion to unbalanced behavior and smearing, as shown 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 smearing the said actress through the penning of so demeaning a piece of libel that it cost him being slapped in public by the actress' husband.

The middle years: maverick radical pundit and novelist (1964–1979)

In the general climate of heady political debate that characterized the early Cold War era in Brazil, Francis styled himself a Trotskyist and it was as a maverick pundit that he was invited in 1963 to write a political column in the Left Vargoist paper Última Hora, where he became known for his radical views. After the fall of Vargoist President João Goulart in 1964, he was banned from the mainstream press, writing instead in various minor papers and magazines, especially the satirical weekly O Pasquim. He wrote mostly about international affairs—and, surprisingly, without his usual vices: among other causes, he opposed the Vietnam War, flouting the official pro-American sympathies of the military government, in texts so unusually sober that they made a critic remark that "only then he became a real mentsch. In the wake of the late 1968 "coup inside the coup"—the takeover of the already existing military dictatorship by diehard generals—he was arrested four times, on the slimmest of pretexts.[6]

In 1971, Paulo Francis moved to New York City as an international correspondent, on a Ford Foundation fellowship, in order to escape from political persecution. His flow of radical comment proceeded. After 1976, he began working on an exclusive basis for the major paper Folha de São Paulo, then under the editorship of the Trotskiyst cadre—and justly famed editor—Claudio Abramo.

In the late 1970s Paulo Francis published in succession, the first two parts of an intended trilogy of social novels (in a style reminiscent of James Joyce) in which Francis intended, as an alternative to the portrayal of the lower classes' typical of later Brazilian modernism—as in Jorge Amado's or Graciliano Ramos' novels—to describe instead 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.

The first novel, Cabeça de Papel ("Paperhead", a pun with a Brazilian nursery rhyme), was published in Brazil in 1977, and the second, Cabeça de Negro (also a pun, this time with the name of a kind of homemade firework called "negro head"), in 1979. Both novels had moderate sales success and critical failure. The Brazilian intellectual climate having changed—especially by the increased prominence of universities instead of journalism in the field of humanities—various scholars were ready to point to Francis's all-too-evident faults: the sloppiness of the writing, the lack of depth in political commentary, and, last but not least, the inevitable confusion arising from Francis's attempt at melding the Joycean stream of consciousness with the plot of what was mostly a run-of-the-mill spy thriller, or, in the words of a critic, "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". The same critic, however, conceded that, behind the patchy plot and the shallow digressions, the greatest achievement of the two novels was Francis's "stylistics of mockery" (retórica da esculhambação) - his grammatically incorrect phrasing, polyglot vocabulary and confused mix between the erudite and the outright vulgar, in short: "a rabble-wise [avacalhada], aggressive rhetorics, in itself a critique of the pompous logorrhea and mystification [proper to Brazilian ruling elites]".

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"), 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—the end-result being an encore of his old confusions, something that led a critic to state that Francis had left only a memoir about the kitsch character of his usual snobbery.

The later years: right-wing pundit and pop culture phenomenon (1979–1997)

In 1980, Francis published a mostly political autobiography upon turning 50, O afeto que se encerra ("The love enclosed" - a pun again, this time with a verse from the lyrics of the Brazilian anthem to the national flag), in which he confirmed his Marxist statements of belief. Shortly afterwards, however, under various and still ill-explained reasons—or perhaps mostly out of a desire to to keep a finger in the political pie during a time when the Left was beginning to enter a process of headlong retreat from the political field (a trait he shared with many other Brazilian intellectuals of the time)—Francis made a sharp turn from Trotskyism to what he called "conservative" views—in fact, sheer right-wing punditry, which offered a mix of bona fide cultural "conservatism" (the hostility to multiculturalism and general "politically correct" views), with a brand of extremely pro-market radicalism in political and economic issues. In that capacity, he became a sworn enemy of everything he deemed "Left" in the Brazilian intellectual and political scene, during the demise of the military dictatorship and after, hurling traits from New York at various academics and politicians, and especially at the Workers' Party, which in the post-dictatorship mass democracy quickly became the dominant Brazilian leftist party. In the words of an academic critic, "He chose carefully his targets and used the most sordid adjectives. The choicest targets were always the leaders of popular movements, the Left, specially the WP, writers and scholars, whom he smeared by name, without subterfuge".

There was, in Francis, always something that was conspicuous in his writings (even in his leftist phase): an elitist (and commonly eurocentric) component that despised popular culture and overestimated the elites' cultural achievement, a naive admiration for the supposed hallmarks of Western "genius" (such as his lifelong infatuations with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, or George Bernard Shaw, or George Jean Nathan), and a tendency to devalue the worth of any work of culture which could not produce a pedigree connecting it to a very exclusive corpus to which Francis' standards of taste were tied. When this elitism was no longer counterbalanced by the genuine concern for the plight of the poor that characterized the young Paulo Francis, the result was an intellectual that actively supported the status quo and virulently opposed any attempts to change it either culturally or politically—eventually with overtly bigoted overtones: one of his most infamous smears was when he expressed his desire to have the WP MP-cum-unionist, the Afro-Brazilian Vicentinho, "whipped as a slave"; in another of his obiter dicta, he stated that "the discovery [sic] of the clarinet by Mozart was a greater contribution than anything Africa gave us until today". As far as his confused later ramblings made some sense, he justified his political shift by his adhering to an extreme and shallow variety of Marxist historicism-cum-supply-side economics: in order to liberate the forces of production and develop Brazil, it is necessary "to surrender the country to people who want and know how to make money - private capital".

Paulo Francis was attacked by many of his former associates, and he was involved in many controversies and acquired fame as a polemic journalist. 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, in an article entitled "a man called refuse [porcaria]"—the word "refuse" being printed out of a drawing in which the letters were sketched so as to appear as fly-decked faeces. 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, but also about the general racist quality of his commentaries, Francis left the Folha during 1991 and began writing his column for the more conservative O Estado de São Paulo.

As a TV commentator, Francis quickly became a pop culture phenomenom, playing the persona of the heartless pundit, always ready to offer stinging comment, in a basso voice, chewing words "as if drunk or stoned"—a trait so grotesque that it earned him various impersonators on Brazilian TV. This public persona—a caricature of himself—was the means he used, in the world of a critic, "to vent his aggression while making himself a success". During the 1980s and 1990s, he played the role of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called fast-thinker: one who has the ability to offer public opinion a ready reactionary common-place for each and every situation.

Last dispute and death

The last polemical act in which Paulo Francis was involved was to attack, on cable TV, the management of Brazilian-state-owned oil corporation Petrobras as dishonest, by saying its directors had a US$50 million trove in a Swiss bank account (something that he stated without offering proof). After Francis’ statements, Petrobras’ management sued him for libel before an American court, based on the fact that the show was broadcast in the US to Brazilian cable TV subscribers. The possibility of having to pay an intended compensation of some US$ 110 million, combined with his already poor health, probably provoked the heart attack that resulted in his death. He died in New York on February 4, 1997, and he was buried in Rio de Janeiro a few days later.

According to his personal friend, political columnist Élio Gaspari, Francis had approached at the time the then-senator José Serra, who supposedly asked President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to obtain that the directors of Petrobras would drop the lawsuit against Francis—to no avail, President Cardoso having chosen to keep mum about the affair.

A summing-up

In the end, what Francis left behind him to be explained was a riddle: the sheer disproportionality between his huge living charisma and the paucity of his actual achievements: or, to put it into a nutshell, the (tragic) fate of a supposed genius dying as a buffoon after "various failed wagers at personal success". A meaningful answer to this riddle will depend on further research. It must be noted, however, that Francis' case has various similarities—on a smaller scale—with that of his younger contemporary Christopher Hitchens (the shift from the Far Left to the Far Right, the supposedly serious intellectual becoming a midia figure) and that both can be taken as case histories for the demise of a brand of 1960s middle-class radicalism, as well as for the demise of mass media as anything other than simply business. However, Hitchens was an actual reporter and never indulged himself into libel on the absence of evidence, while the late Francis had as his central tactic the slander of the most respectful personalities—a specifically Brazilian trait, taken by the mass media scholar Kucinski as a general technique of rule for the entire Brazilian ruling élite.

External links

• Official site
• Intellectual Satire and the Novels of Paulo Francis English review of his novels in Portuguese by Malcolm Silverman.