Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE MAIAS” by Eca de Queiroz (first published in Portuguese as Os Maias: Episodias da Vida Romantica [“Episodes of Romantic Life”] 1888; first English translation by Patricia McGowan Pinheiro and Ann Stevens, 1965; second English translation by Margaret Jull Costa, 2008)

            How ethical is it for a book’s blurb – or a book review – to give away something that the author clearly intended to be a major surprise for the reader?

I’ll leave you pondering that question before I give my opinion on the matter late in the notice you are now reading.

As you may be aware, in 2017 and 2018 I wrote, for this blog, critiques of five of the novels of Portugal’s canonical novelist Jose Maria de Eca de Queiroz (1845-1900). They were his anti-clerical satires The Sin of Father Amaro (also known as The Crime of Father Amaro) and TheRelic; possibly his most-read novel, the Flaubert-esque tale of adultery Cousin Bazilio; the account of a decaying aristocracy The IllustriousHouse of Ramires; and the very light-hearted comedy The City and the Mountains. Why was I reading Eca de Queiroz’s novels? Because I planned to spend three weeks in Portugal as part of a longer European journey, and I wanted to get some Portuguese lit. under my belt before going there.

But there was one Eca de Queiroz novel on my shelves that I didn’t get around to reading before visiting Portugal (in January 2019) - and that was The Maias. The reason was very simple. All Eca de Queiroz’s other novels are as long as the average modern novel – between 200 and 350 pages. But The Maias is much longer – 633 closely-printed pages in the 1965 translation by Patricia McGowan Pinheiro and Ann Stevens that I eventually read. Somehow I never found the time to tackle it before my long summer break this year (2020).

Apparently the author spent longer writing this novel than any of his other works. He laboured over it, on and off, for ten years from 1878 to its publication in 1888. Though it concerns particular characters it is clear that he intended it to be a (largely condemnatory) portrait of a whole society. So it is capacious, panoramic and has a large cast of characters.

To strip the plot down to its essentials, it goes something like this. Old Afonso da Maia was a radical in his youth, but he has aged into a conservative aristocratic gentleman. Now widowed, his hope for the future of his family is his only son Pedro. But Pedro impulsively marries a woman who tires of him. She runs away with another man, leaving her young son Carlos with Pedro, but taking her infant daughter with her. Heartbroken, Pedro commits suicide and all communication with his wife is lost. Old Afonso takes on the duty of raising his grandson Carlos, who is now the sole heir to this noble family.

Thus the premise, covered in the novel’s opening two chapters. What follows is the life of Carlos as a young man, he being the novel’s focus.

Carlos studies medicine at the university of Coimbra, qualifies as a doctor, and sets up a practice in Lisbon, as well as writing a couple of academic papers. Carlos aspires to do “something brilliant” and make a name for himself. But as we are told: “For Carlos, in whom the man of fashion was mingled with the man of learning, [“something brilliant”] could mean a combination of social success and scientific activity; a profound ferment of ideas amid the pampered influences of wealth; the lofty detachment of philosophical study alongside refinements of sport and taste… At heart he was a dilettante.” (Book 1, Chapter 4) In short, he is no scholar and not really committted to medicine. He is more interested in idling and in seducing fashionable women, sometimes under cover of medical consultations. He has an affair with the (married) Countess de Gouvarinho, whom he sees at first as the love of his life and whom he pursues to Cintra (sometimes spelled Sintra), the picturesque town where the upper crust holiday. But then he meets Maria, the wife of the Brazilian businessman Castro Gomes. And suddenly Maria is his ideal woman. Dumping the countess, who still annoyingly clings to him, he now embarks on a passionate affair with Maria, enabled by the fact that Maria’s husband is away on a long business trip. At her persuasion, he buys her a love-nest in the country. The author elides actual copulation under sensuous descriptions of the love nest and its furnishings. Carlos is so besotted with Maria that he plans to run away with her and leave Portugal forever.

And that, in brief, is an outline of most of the novel. But like all outlines it is reductive and misleading, because The Maias has many, many characters and the dandyish, decadent circle in which Carlos moves reflects many aspects of late nineteenth-century Portugal. (Background historical details tell us that the story is set mainly in the late 1870s and early 1880s). Apart from his grandfather, chief among Carlos’ familiars are the self-proclaimed philosopher and progressive thinker Ega, who claims to be writing an epic of human consciousness; the hyper-romantic poet Alencar, always harking back to Portugal’s glorious past; the composer of operettas Cruges, who is urged by friends to write something more serious; the Maia family’s steward Vilaca, who has to do all the family’s messy paperwork; and the gossip and tittle-tattle dandy Damaso, who proves to be a destructive force. To each is attached a complex story.

The novel opens with a description of the Maias’ stately home Ramalhete.  Throughout the novel, the author characterises people by their style and that includes their residences. There are long and leisurely descriptions of the décor and furnishings of the main characters’ domiciles, in each case revealing old aristocratic, or bourgeois, or dandyish-bohemian tastes.

Social satire and commentary are to the fore, although in this novel Eca de Queiroz goes light on the anti-clericalism. Priests in this case are generally figures vaguely in the background.  There are just a few anti-clerical jabs. In Book 1, Chapter 3 there is the comic clash between Brian, English tutor of Carlos when Carlos is a boy, and the priest Father Custodio, who wishes to drill the boy in the Catechism. There are repeated jokes about the pious boy Eusebio, hated by Carlos in his childhood, who proves to be a Tartuffe and is caught out, holidaying with two tarts. And, having a bit of fun at the expense of Protestants, there is very gentle satire of a pious Englishwoman who hands out tracts in the hopes of turning Portugal Anglican (opening of Book 1, Chapter 10).

 More important, though, is a growing awareness of the country’s unimportance. Hanging over Portugal and its doddery monarchy, there is the sour realization that what was once a proud imperial power has become a second-rate backwater. Other European nations do not heed anything the nation has to offer. As a character reflects in the very last chapter “What did being a Portuguese diplomat really mean? Just another form of idleness passed abroad, with a permanent conviction of one’s insignificance.” (Book 2, Chapter 8)

For modern sophistication and culture, Portugal looks north. A character called Steinbroken, a diplomat from Finland, makes some pungent comments on Portugal’s backwardness. To Carlos and his circle, the greatest influences are England and France. Lisbon’s high society take their manners from the English but they banter in French. The English are admired for their practicality and statecraft and parliamentary system. John Stuart Mill is invoked and there is an English character called Craft [what a name!] whose level-headed views often trump romantic Portuguese nostalgia. (It is worth noting the Eca de Queiroz served as a Portuguese consul in Bristol, and wrote much of The Maias there.) The French are admired for their style and their republicanism and radicalism and inspirational literature. Voltaire and Victor Hugo and Zola and Balzac are invoked (Ega’s house is called the Villa Balzac), and some characters frequently express their admiration for Gambetta, the man who proclaimed a new French Republic after the fall of Napoleon III. Paris is still the destination of choice for chic Potuguese travellers. (And the word “chic” is often used as a term of approbation.)

But Portugal’s upper classes are vain and venal. This is made rudely clear in an elaborate, semi-farcical scene (in Book 1, Chapter 10), set at race meeting, where the wealthy playboy Carlos bets against the favourite just for the fun of it, and has the amusement of seeing aristocrats and bourgeoisie following his lead in the hope of quick riches.

The newspapers are corrupt – either they toady to the monarchy and current ministry or they butt into private life and print salacious gossip. Late in the novel the swinish Damaso is able to plant in a gossip column an article about Carlos’s liason with Maria. In revenge, Carlos gets material humiliating Damaso printed in a rival paper. In both cases, the newspapers prove very easy to bribe

The direct satire on politics is broad. Conservatives and progressives meet in salons and drawing rooms where radical or liberal ideas prevail and the more conservative people either grumble or hold their peace. Of course, after all their radical talk, the liberals wouldn’t think of giving up any of their elite privileges for the common good. There are pointless discussions between the Positivist Ega and the neo-Romantic Alencar. There is make-believe talk about revolution which none of the chattering class would actually support if it came to the crunch. Instead, in their leisure time, the young salon chatterers congregate in (obviously second-rate) opera houses and flirt with, or idolise, or plan to seduce young women – especially married ones.

Book 2 Chapter 6 contains the most sustained direct satire on Portugal’s ailing monarchy. A public meeting is addressed by a conservative orator who is applauded for a speech consisting of pious platitudes. And, showing how nothing will change easily in this society, Alancar reads a poem in praise of a Republic, but it is expressed in such florid and unreal terms that even the aristocrats and comfortable middle-classes applaud. Presented as an unreal and unrealisable dream, a radical republic can’t harm them.

The (ruling) society that de Queiroz paints is decadent, nerveless, static, decaying and incapable of improving itself.

But when all this is noted as the tale’s milieu, de Queiroz’s chief mode of satire is his systematic dissection of the romantic illusions of upper-class Portuguese males. It is surely ironic that the novel’s original subtitle was “Episodes of Romantic Life” because de Queiroz spends so much space ridiculing amorous rhetoric, excessive romanticism and obsolete codes of honour as men conduct their sexual affairs. These are all parts of the country’s decadence.

In Book 1, Chapter 9 there is the almost self-contained story of Ega, dressed as Mephistopheles, crashing a party put on by the Jewish banker Cohen, because he wants to seduce Cohen’s wife Rachel. Instead he is very readily kicked out by Cohen and stomps off impotently, swearing revenge and threatening a duel… neither of which he can really undertake. Instead, from the author’s point of view, he is a figure of fun, acting like a character in a melodrama and easily argued out of his notions of revenge by the Englishman Craft and by Carlos himself. And besides, Ega’s regard for the desired Rachel diminishes when he discovers that she has never cheated on her husband in all the time he was pursuing her. Isn’t his romanticism little more than the thrill of competitiveness with another man?

As for Carlos himself, despite all the scenes of passion, his romantic affairs are step by step shown to be shallow and self-deluded. He claims to himself that he idolises each woman he loves. When meeting an earlier lover for the first time, we are told: “Carlos could not distinguish her features; all he could perceive amid the marble splendour of her flesh was the profound blackness of two eyes that fixed themselves on him. Insensibly he took a step after her… As she moved away she seemed to him taller and more beautiful; and that false, literary image of a goddess reaching the earth gripped his imagination… Yes, she was certainly a goddess.”  (Book 1, Chapter 7) Note de Queiroz’s eagerness to tell us that his attraction is a “false, literary image”, not rooted in reality.

When Carlos is with the Countess de Gouvarinho, but before he actually beds her, he has the same reaction : “And little by little, there began to arise in his soul a romantic idylly that was radiant and absurd: a breath of passion, stronger than human laws, would toss then violently and join his destiny to hers; then, what a sublime existence hidden in a nest of flowers and sun, far away in some corner of Italy. Every sort of idea of love, absolute devotion, sacrifice invaded him deliciously…” (Book 1, Chapter 8)

So Carlos puts the countess on a pedestal and wraps her in a romantic haze. But as soon as he gets bored with her, we are told: “The Countess was becoming absurd with her eager, audacious determination to invade his entire life, to assume the largest and deepest place in it, as though that first kiss they had exchanged had united not only their lips for one instant, but also their destinies – and for ever…” (Book 1, Chapter 10). Note how he fears she intends to take over “his entire life”. So what price his early claims to an all-absorbing worship of her?

But the essential vacuity of his life is clear in such passages as: “After supper Carlos leafed through the Figaro, read a page or two of Byron, tried his hand at billiards in the empty room, whistled a malaguena on the terrace, and finally went out with no destination in mind…”  (Book 2, Chapter 4) Love is a pastime, a game, a way of killing time, despite all the overblown rhetoric attached to it.

Where Carlos’ amorous affairs are concerned, Eca de Queiroz is a master of double-edged irony. Take this passage in which Carlos’ staid grandfather Afonso regrets that Carlos is taking up with a woman of little social standing: “Carlos was going off with Maria, was going to achieve perfect felicity; but he was going to destroy once and for all old Afonso’s happiness, and the noble peace and calm which had brought him such a contented old age. He was a man of bygone eras, austere and pure, one of those strong souls which would never know a moment of weakness, and in this frank, manly, clean-cut solution to a problem of indomitable love he could see only – libertininsm! The natural espousal of souls, as something over and above fictitous civil laws, would mean nothing to him; and he would never understand this subtle, sentimental ideology, with which they, like all transgressors, tried to cloak their errant ways. As far as Afonso was concerned he would be simply a man who was taking away another man’s wife and another man’s child, who was disrupting a family, destroying a home, and descending into concubinage….” (Book 2, Chapter 4) At first this seems to satirise the old fogey and his old-fashioned values… until we refect that the novelist has already been hammering away at the shallowness of the sentimental passions of his grandson. Carlos’ self-justifying motives are being equally condemned.

The rich irony is reinforced just a few pages later in this overwrought, and I would suggest tongue-in-cheek, description of the lovemaking of Carlos and Maria: “Outside, far out over the sea, a roll of thunder sounded slow and heavy. But Maria no longer heard the night, for she was in Carlos’s arms. Never had she desired him, adored him so much! It seemed her avid kisses wanted to reach further than the flesh, penetrate and devour his very soul. And all night, amid these splendid brocades, with her hair loose, and looking divine in her nakedness, she seemed to have turned into the goddess he had always imagined her, and she had at last claimed him, clasping him to her immortal breast, soaring with him now in a celebration of love, high above on clouds of gold.”   (Book 2, Chapter 4) We have already been warned that his conceits about goddesses are shallow, and all we are really seeing here is his canonisation of an orgasm in a moment of passion.

We also note that when Maria’s “husband” at last confronts Carlos, he turns out not to be her husband and makes it clear that he regards Maria as merely a woman whom he bought with his wealth. Carlos’s amour propre is punctured somewhat as he realises he has mistaken a lower-class woman for someone of the elite. However, his snobbery is later overcome by her tearful narration of her deprived life.

And thus far we have come in the narrative before we reach that ethical matter I raised at the opening of this notice, to wit “How ethical is it for a book’s blurb – or a book review – to give away something that the author clearly intended to be a major surprise for the reader?”

Only on p.554, of the 633-page novel I read, do we first discover that Maria, the woman to whom Carlos passionately makes love, is in fact his sister – the daughter of his long-lost mother who had cut all contact with the Maia family and whose later life was unknown to them. So, in the last eighty pages of the novel, we have a case of incest. Only the most alert readers might have picked up the subtle hints that Eca de Queiroz drops earlier in the novel, such as this passage when the unknowing Carlos is first getting to know Maria: “He found he had made a full confession of his own life, and yet knew nothing of her past, not even where she had been born, nor the street she had lived in in Paris. He never heard her mention her husband’s name, nor speak of a friend or a joyous event in her household.”  (Book 2, Chapter 1)

Yet the publisher’s blurb of the edition I read loudly proclaims the element of incest in the novel, as if it were the heart and soul of The Maias – so Carlos’ painful position in the last few chapters came as no surprise to me. And the woefully inaccurate “summary” of the novel given by Wikipedia ignores over five-sixths of the novel and suggests that it focuses on incest.

Now that I’ve broached the topic, we have to ask why incest figures in the novel at all. Was Eca de Queiroz simply introducing a sensational topic to give the novel a dramatic ending? OR (and I think this is really the case) was the incest element used symbolically to suggest an ultimate decadence in this under-developed society?  

The author shows his technical skill by having not Carlos, but his friend Ega, first discovering and reacting with shock to the incestuous situation. It is in Ega’s thoughts that we are given the clearest summary of Carlos’ situation: “He could feel now the torture in which poor Carlos was struggling, under the sway of a passion which had till then been legitimate and which at a bitter moment had suddenly turned monstrous, though without losing anything of its charm and intensity. He was human and weak and unable to stop being swept along by that violent impulse of love and desire which drove him before it like a tempest! He’d yielded, succumbed to those arms which innocently continued to call him. And there he was now, appalled at his sin, driven out of the house, spending the day away from his family and friends, wandering tragically around like an excommunicated man who fears to encounter pure eyes which reflect the horror of his sinfulness…” (Book 2, Chapter 7)

Carlos had committed incest unknowingly in his liaison with Maria. Yet be it noted that, before he nerves himself to tell her what the real situation is, Carlos cannot give up the chance of sleeping with her one more time before they part. This is the novel’s ultimate judgement on all his fine and florid idealisations of romantic love. Essentially he is motivated by lust, competition with other men and the call of his penis… and always aware of his own material self-interest.

The last chapter of the book (Book 2, Chapter 8) is, after the great emotional upheavals that precede it, deliberately bathetic and a big let-down. Ten years later, Carlos is simply filing his relationship with Maria under “experience”. It is clear that (Ega and) Carlos will never be shaken out of their complacency. Carlos now lives as a boulevardier in Paris, and, echoing the novel’s very opening, there is a description of the family home Ramalhete now unrepaired and decaying – symbol of a society’s decay. Ega and Carlos are last seen scrambling to catch a tram. They are just like Portugal, scrambling ineptly to catch up with the modern world.

In my typically grim, censorious and po-faced review, I have given you the impression that The Maias is a deeply serious novel, offering a grim critique of the author’s home country. Certainly it does just this, being a more lacerating account of the Portuguese ruling classes than anything Dickens ever wrote about the English ruling classes. But I have neglected to emphasise that, in its satirical and ironic way, much of The Maias is very funny, once we have caught on that the characters are not the influential people in the world that they think they are. And, of course, its frankness about sex made it untranslatable in the English-speaking world until nearly 70 years after its first publication.

Pompous and self-important footnote… as most footnotes are: If you go on line, you will find many of those sad “reader’s reviews” attached to publicity for certain books. These “reader’s reviews” are generally one brief paragraph wherein readers give unconsidered accounts of their subjective reaction to a book. I scanned the “reader’s reviews” of a translation of The Maias, and found some describing it as a  “passionate love story”. Rubbish! The ironical Eca de Queiroz is systematically kicking the pants out of “passionate love stories” by showing what social realities underlie them and how much they are simply the pastimes of jaded roues.

Totally frivolous and silly footnote for the very few of you who have bothered to read this far: Halfway through The Maias, there is mention of an English governess, “the daughter of a clergyman, [who] had fourteen brothers and sisters: the boys were in New Zealand and they were as strong as athletes.” (Book 2, Chapter 1) Interesting to see that, even for a Portuguese writer in the late 19^th century, New Zealand already had a reputation as the appropriate place for hardy, athletic blokes.