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 biting wit and sarcasm - which were taken for granted by friends and adversaries alike, but which were considered by his critiques as a bonus as well as a limitation.

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".^[1]

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^[2]. 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^[3]—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,^[4][5] imprecision, garbled recollections"^[6] - 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".^[7]

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. After a go as a director between 1954 and 1956 - during which he staged, with moderate success, five plays^[8] - Francis started in 1957 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".^[9] 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.^[10]

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

During the late 1950s, Francis worked mostly as a culture and literary critic, being, for instance , one of the editors of the legendary culture magazine Senhor, where he published stories by at the time little-known writers such as Clarice Lispector^[11] and Guimarães Rosa^[12]. However, 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^[13]. At the time professing to have joined one of the paramilitary "groups of eleven" being organized by maverick leftist leader Leonel Brizola^[14], Francis fell out of favor after the fall of Vargoist President João Goulart in 1964, being 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.^[15] 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.[22]

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 famed editor Cláudio 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 he intended, as an alternative to the portrayal of the lives of the rural lower and/or higher classes typical of later Brazilian modernism—as in Érico Veríssimo's, Jorge Amado's or Graciliano Ramos' novels^[16]—in short: to shun what he saw as the populist streak of Brazilian modern fiction^[17], describing 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"^[18])—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. Brazilian scholars criticised Francis' writing for sloppiness and lack of depth^[19] in his political commentary ^[20] and confusion arising from Francis's attempt at melding the Joycean stream of consciousness with the plot of a 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".^[21] The same critics, however, added that, behind the patchy plot and the shallow digressions - in which the writer, by means of incessant quotes and untimely comment, couldn't refrain from offering his erudition in a showcase to the prospective reader^[22] - the greatest achievement of the two novels was Francis's "stylistics of mockery" (retórica da esculhambação) - his grammatically incorrect phrasing, polyglot vocabulary^[23] 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]".^[21]. However, despite the author's avowedly leftism at the time, his tone was already that of a nihilist: in the words of an American critic, what every character in Francis' novels displayed - irrespective of political affiliation - was the same "careless erotico-politic debauchery, conspiscuous consuming, belligerent use of obscenities and a general disdain for everyone"^[24]. Such was an outwardly 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^[25].

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 critique^[26] 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"),^[27] 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 a critic to state that Francis had left only a memoir about the kitsch character of his usual snobbery.^[28]

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.^[29] Shortly afterwards, however, under various and still ill-explained reasons^[30]—or perhaps mostly out of a desire to maintain relevance during a time when the Left was beginning to enter a process of headlong retreat from the political field^[31] (a trait he shared with many other Brazilian intellectuals of the time^[32])—Francis made a sharp turn from Trotskyism to conservative views. An attrition 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 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 mostly the leaders of popular movements, the Left, specially the WP, writers and scholars, whom he smeared by name, without subterfuge".^[33] He was also widely criticised for having little understanding of the Brazilian realities, commenting on it while living abroad^[34] - as well as feigning an acquaintance with the New Yorker intellectual milieu he didn't actually possess^[35].

Already as a Left intellectual, Francis had nurtured a deep-seated cultural elitism, as well as a loathing for the emergence of the so-called new social movements- as expressed, for instance, in his lifelong misogyny.^[36] Therefore the fact that, in later years, he came to express a fear that the emergence of a grassroots, mass politics Left such as the Workers' Party represented, for him , the risk that Brazil and the Brazilians could distance themselves from the "our cultural heritage[sic] which is the West, the USA".^[37]

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"^[38]; 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"^[39]. 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"^[40]. As far as these and others of his confused later ramblings made some sense^[41], 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".^[42]

Paulo Francis was attacked by many of his former associates, and the amount of disputes in which he became involved heightened his fame as a controversial journalist (selling his opinion as a marketable commodity, in the words of a critic^[43]) . Many of these polemics became, in themselves, pop culture events, as was the case of the show of mutual animosity between him and popular composer Caetano Veloso.^[44]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.^[45]. 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, where Costa also accused him of racism ^[46] Francis left the Folha during 1991 and began writing his column for the O Estado de São Paulo.

As a TV commentator, Francis quickly became a pop culture phenomenon, playing the persona of the heartless pundit, always ready to offer stinging comment, in a basso voice, chewing words "as if drunk or stoned" — earning 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".^[47] 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^[48].In his desire to score points amid heated polemics, Francis tended ever more, in his later years, to develop a scanter regard for factual truth: according to an anecdote told by one of his friends, when Francis still worked for Folha de São Paulo, one reporter, charged with revising his column, approched 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 that "sonny, it's your numbers who must check with reality; Francis' numbers needn't"^[49].

Last dispute and death

The last controversial act in which Paulo Francis was involved was in an attack, on cable TV, of the management of Brazilian-state-owned oil corporation Petrobras as dishonest. Francis also claimed, unfoundedly, that its directors had a US$50 million trove in a Swiss bank account. After Francis’ statements, Petrobras’ management sued him for libel before an American court, based on the fact that the show was broadcast in the US to Brazilian cable TV subscribers. The possibility of having to pay an intended compensation of some US$ 110 million, combined with his already poor health, could have caused the heart attack that resulted in his death^[50]. He died in New York on February 4, 1997, and he was buried in Rio de Janeiro a few days later. He was survived by his wife, fellow journalist Sonia Nolasco.

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.^[51].

Legacy

Francis left behind himself a divided legacy, as his Left critics and Right admirers sharply diverged in the overall appreciation of his career: for the Left, his was a sad tale of betrayal of the Left culture of the 1950s and 1960s Brazilian intelligentsia in which he was nurtured ^[52] for the saking of forging oneself a success in the Cultural Industry - something that led some critics to believe that there was something wrong with his culture and personality from the very beginning ^[53]. Some said that, even in his leftist phase, Francis always used his supposedly erudition as a commodity, for the sake of exerting an authoritarian influence on the cultural debate, a kind of "pedantcracy"^[54] Conversely, his late conservative friends and admirers - as well as some Left friends he kept from his past - praised him heartily for his high culture, his stylistic and satirical qualities, in short: his public persona, in the process downplaying the content of his more controversial statements and/or praising his lucidity in admitting openly the demise of his earlier leftist ideals^[55]. Be as it is, his posthumous visibility is remarkable to this day.

References- books

• KUCINSKI, Bernardo - "Paulo Francis: uma tragédia brasileira", IN A Síndrome da Antena Parabólica, São Paulo: Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo, 1998, ISBN 85-86469-12-2.

• MOURA, George - Paulo Francis: o Soldado fanfarrão, Rio de Janeiro, Objetiva, 2nd. edition, 1996, ISBN 85-7302-089-X.

Notes

External links

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

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