Paulo Francis

Franz Paul Trannin da Matta Heilborn, also known as 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 and sarcasm, which tended however—specially in his late career—to degenerate into "cruelty, compulsive smearing and abuse". [Bernardo Kucinski, "Paulo Francis: uma tragédia brasileira" IN "A Síndrome da Antena Parabólica", São Paulo, Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo,1998, ISBN 85-86469-12-2]

Early life and career (1930-1964)

Born in 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" [Francis, "O afeto que se encerra", memoir, quoted by Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.92] .

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 due to the fact that he had already dropped out from his undergraduate studies in Rio, a subject about which he was always less than candid [Cf.Alexandre Torres Fonseca, "Paulo Francis, do Teatro à Política: 'Perdoa-me por me traíres'", unpublished M.Sc.dissertation, History Department, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2001, avaliable at www.dominiopublico.gov.br as Adobe Acrobat document, pg.41; Francis later used to say that he had "refused" to write a thesis under Bentley's sponsorship, as well as receiving a Ph.D in Political Science at Indiana State University during the 1970s, out of "tedium and a lack of respect" for academic life - "apud" Torres Fonseca, "ibid", "loc.cit."] - 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 [To offer only one example: in an article purporting to offer a list of masterworks of world literature,avaliable at www.hps.infolink.com.br/paulofrancis/pf4d01.htm, Francis lists Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" and then goes on to describe the Athenian demagogue Cleon as an "Spartan" leader - or "Führer", to be precise...] ,imprecision, garbled recollections" [Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.85] - 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" [Kucinski, "ibid.", "loc.cit."] .

Neverthless, his acquaintance with contemporary American criticism made him ready for the important role he was to play in Brazilian theater, that 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. 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" ["A arte de dirigir 1", "Diário Carioca", 7/29/1961, as quoted by George Moura, "Paulo Francis: o Soldado fanfarrão", Rio de Janeiro, Objetiva, 2nd. edition, 1996, ISBN 85-7302-089-X, pg.62] . 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 [Cf. Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.84] .

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 [On Francis "Última Hora" column, see Alexandre Torres Fonseca, "op.cit", "passim"] . 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, specially 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, flaunting the official pro-American sympathies of the military government, in texts so unusually sober that made a critic remark that "only then he became a real "mentsch" [Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.91- in Yiddish in the original] . 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 [cf. www1.folha.uol.com.br/fol/cult/cu04026.htm] .

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.

However, he never entirely forswore his somewhat inflated intellectual pretentions, something that led him, in the late 1970s, to try his heand at novel writing, and to publish, in sucession, the first two parts of an intended trilogy of social novels (in a style supposedly 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" [Vinicius Torres Freire, "Super-homens nos botecos do Leblon", "Folha de São Paulo", 2/4/2007] ) - 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 rhime), 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 made a moderate sales sucess and a critical failure. The Brazilian intellectual climate having changed - specially 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 [Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.87] and, last but not least, the inevitable confusion arising from Francis' 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" [Torres Freire, "op.cit."] . The same critic, however, conceded that, behind the patchy plot and the shallow digressions, the greatest achievement of the two novels was Francis' "stylistics of mockery" ["retórica da esculhambação"] - his grammatically incorrect phrasing, poliglot vocabulary and confused mix between the erudite and the outright vulgar, in short: "a rabble-wise ["avacalhada"] , agressive rhetorics, in itself a critique of the pompous logorrhea and mystification [proper to Brazilian ruling elites] " [Torres Freire, "ibid."] .

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") [Paulo Francis, "Carne Viva", ed. by Sonia Nolasco Heilborn, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Francis, 2008, ISBN 978-85-89362-79-5] , 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 [Vinicius Torres Freire, "Memórias de um esnobismo kitsch e clichê", "Folha de São Paulo", 6 March 2008] .

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 [Cf. Kucinski, "op.cit.", pgs.87/88] . Shortly afterwards, however, under various and somewhat 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 characteristic of the ex-communist described by Issac Deutscher, "Heretics and Renegades", London, Hamish Hamilton, 1955, pg.20] (a trait he shared with many other Brazilian intellectuals of the time [Kucinski compares Francis to Glauber Rocha and the composer Geraldo Vandré, in that all three had to flee Brazil during the repression bout of the 1970s, suffering then a process "of intellectual uprooting [...] that led them to various degrees of mental confusion" (Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.89] ) - Francis made a sharp turn from Trotskyism to what he called "conservative" views - In fact, sheer rightwing 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 [Something that was in itself, a telling trait of the matropolitan world-view of the mainstream Brazilian press, described, after Francis' death, by the former MP and journalist Marcio Moreira Alves: to keep an expensive international correspondent in New York in order to have him write mostly about Brazil, "a country he hated and hardly knew" - Moreira Alves, "apud" "O Globo", 5 February 1997] at various academics and politicians, and specially 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" [Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.86] .

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 supposedly 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 devaluate 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 characterised 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 bigot 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" [Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.87] ; 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" [Quoted by Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.92] . As far as his confused later ramblings made some sense [In a Francis obituary, one of his late political friends, the former financial tsar of the military dictatorship Roberto Campos, would admit that Francis' columns were intelectually worthless, but made neverthless good propaganda: " [They were] a weird bouquet of [...] economic guesswork... [But then] there are many writers but few able to box for ideas" - "O Globo", 9 February 1997] , 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's necessary "to surrender the country to people who want and know how to make money - private capital" ["O Estado de São Paulo", April 25 1991]

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 TV commentator for Rede Globo - something that it was in itselv 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 [Paulo Francis "Um homem chamado porcaria", "O Pasquim", 14th. January 1971. In the article, Francis denounced the fact of his having been listed, during one of his prisions, in Marinho's paper O Globo, as one of the political prisioners that should be freed abroad in exchange for the release of the German ambassador to Brazil,who had been kidnapped and held hostage by underground leftist guerrillas - such "ransomed" prisioners being mandatorily deprived of the Brazilian citizenship.] . 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 [ In one of his columns at the time, Costa wrote that " if [Francis'] prejudices were taken to the letter, and punished according to the estatute-book, he would now be serving more than a hundred-year-term in jail" - Caio Túlio Costa, "Folha de S. Paulo", 2/18/1990] , Francis left the "Folha" during 1991 and began writing his column to the more conservative O Estado de São Paulo.

As 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 of grotesque that 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" [Kucinski, "op.cit", pg.93] . 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 [Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, "Sobre a Televisão", Portuguese trans. of "Sur la télévision", Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar Editor, ISBN 85-7110-411-5 , pgs.38/41] . However, in the end, he had to eat his own words in an episode that ended his career irrevocably.

Last dispute and death

The last polemical act which Paulo Francis was involved in 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 [Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.94] . 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 [Cf. Élio Gaspari, "Parabéns, Dr. Joel Rennó, o Sr. matou Paulo Francis" - syndicated column published on "Folha de S.Paulo", 5 February 1997] .

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 [Cf. Mario Maestri, "O intelectual raivoso", 2005, avaliable at www.consciencia.net/2005/mes/06/maestri-intelectualraivoso.html] : or, to put into a nutshell, the (tragic) fate of a supposed genius dying as a buffoon after "various failed wagers at personal success" [Kucinski, "op.cit.", pgs. 94 & 93] . A meaningful answer to this riddle will depend on further reasearch. 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. [Kucinski, "op.cit.", pg.83]

References

External links

* [http://www.paulofrancis.com official site (in Portuguese)]
* [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0024-7413(198224)19%3A2%3C209%3AISATNO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G Intellectual Satire and the Novels of Paulo Francis] English review of his novels in Portuguese by Malcolm Silverman.