A Portuguese Master

Abstract

A Portuguese Master John McCormick (bio) José Maria Eça de Queirós , The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions, 2007. 628 pages. $17.95 pb. The long history of Portuguese literature is rich in lyric and epic verse, while in prose fiction it is provincial and slight until the work of Eça de Queirós (1845–1900). After earning a law degree at Coimbra, Eça traveled to Egypt and Palestine before becoming a journalist in Lisbon. In 1872 he joined the consular service, serving in Cuba, the United States, England, and France. At his death he was consul general in Paris. He was much taken with French naturalism as he found it in Flaubert and Zola; among his many novels and short fiction, The Sin of Father Amaro (1871) fully registers that indebtedness. By 1880 and The Maias, Eça had learned to salt naturalistic heaviness with wit, irony, and a fine eye for human and natural variety. The Maias concerns three generations of a wealthy Portuguese family. At first glance it might seem to be one more old-fashioned nineteenth-century family novel on the order of, say, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901). Early in the narrative, however, it becomes obvious that the only old-fashioned quality here is its date. Eça's timelessness derives from his formal mastery in prose, humorous and sardonic, spontaneous and graceful, for which only sprezzatura is an adequate description. Those qualities apply equally to Margaret Jull Costas's superb translation. It soon becomes clear, as one reads, that even the subtitle, Episodes from Romantic Life, is playful and ironic. Eça sees romanticism as deluded, as does Flaubert in Madame Bovary and L'éducation sentimentale, though he lacks Flaubert's unvarying objectivity and humorlessness. The Lisbon residence of the family is the Casa do Ramalhete, the House of the Bouquet of Flowers—"that name deriving from the square panel of decorative tiles placed in the spot intended for a coat of arms that had never materialised, and which depicted a large bunch of sunflowers tied with a ribbon on which one could still just make out the letters and numbers of a date." Well into the narrative, the reader realizes that on that first page, [End Page 146] without trumpets, the dominant note has been sounded by that square panel intended for but never graced by a coat of arms that the Maias in better days would have been granted. Instead, a troubled politics, outrageous misrule by monarchs, and the boilings of Portuguese history, together with the civilized acceptance of his pleasant lot, characterize the history of the excellent Alfonso, father of Pedro and grandfather of Carlos, whose life and times predominate. Unfulfilled aspirations, self-blighted careers, too, will not surprise us. Ramalhete, solid and vast, has the gloomy appearance of an ecclesiastical residence and had been considered appropriate for the papal nuncio, but was rejected for the lack of the fine garden to which "as a Roman prelate" he was accustomed. The note is anticlerical and will sound in a minor but significant key throughout. Ramalhete and the city contrast with the idyllic family estate at Santa Olávia, some few miles from Lisbon on the river Douro. The peace and tranquility of the two settings fail to reflect the turmoil that afflicts all three generations of the family. We first meet Alfonso de Maias as an old widower, given to cold morning baths and to family decorum, seemingly a standard family novel's stalwart. The cold baths, however, are "his morning prayers"—novelty rather than pattern presides here. In Alfonso's youth his father saw him as the fiercest Jacobin because of his reading matter: Rousseau, Voltaire, Helvétius, and the Encyclopedists. Bored by his stern father's household, Alfonso flees to England. Enchanted by England, he is forced to return home after his father's sudden death. Soon he is married to Dona Maria Eduarda Runa, lovely but sickly and delicate. A son, Pedro, is born, but there is no further progeny. Alfonso hates "the bestial, sordid world" of the royal palace; reports of his opinions reach the palace and...